


Girl on the Edge of Nowhere

by RLeeSmith



Series: Everything Is All Right [1]
Category: Five Nights at Freddy's
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-09-23
Packaged: 2018-07-10 19:06:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 190,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7000954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RLeeSmith/pseuds/RLeeSmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>TRIGGER WARNING! The Five Nights At Freddy’s game was built around a story of child abduction and murder, and boy, I picked up that ball and ran with it. This first part of the series is the tamest of all, and it contains strong adult themes, including adult language, drug and alcohol references, sexual themes, violence, and scenes of child abuse. Future episodes will contain graphic depictions of child abduction, violence towards children and adults, graphic gore violence and explicit sexual content. This book should probably not be read by anyone.</p><p>Five Nights At Freddy’s is the creation of Scott Cawthon. The characters of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Mangle, Toy Freddy, Toy Bonnie, Toy Chica, Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fredbear, Springtrap, Plushtrap, the Puppet, Balloon Boy, and the Purple Guy, as well as Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, belong to him. Everything else is a product of my own imagination and no similarity to actual events, locations, or people is intended or should be inferred. Do not reproduce, repost or copy any part of this story without my permission. </p><p>If you are interested in my non-fanfiction work, feel free to check out my blog at rleesmith.wordpress.com or look me up on Amazon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_“Welcome to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a magical place for kids and grown-ups alike, where fantasy and fun come to life! Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for damage to property or person. Upon discovering that damage or death has occurred, a missing person report will be filed within 90 days, or as soon as property and premises have been thoroughly cleaned and bleached, and the carpets have been replaced…”_

 

CHAPTER ONE

November 5th, 1993

Ana Stark waited up all night, but he didn’t come, and when the grey glow of morning began to light her window, she slipped the knife back into its hiding place beneath her mattress and cried herself to sleep. In another hour, her mother’s shrill alarm clock woke her through the wall and she cried again, silently, because she could hear her mother thumping and swearing her way down the hall, still alive. But she didn’t cry long. It was Friday, a school day. She had only to get through this one last day and then she had the whole weekend with David over at Aunt Easter’s house to figure out what went wrong.

Moving quietly, so as not to attract her mother’s attention, Ana pushed back the old sleeping bag that was her winter blanket and climbed up off the bare mattress that was her bed. She dragged the heavy army surplus trunk where she kept her clothes away from the door and quickly dressed. It was still too dark to see very well, but she didn’t need the light; she kept her jeans on the left and her t-shirts on the right, separated by a barrier of ragged panties and rolled-up pairs of socks. Her long-sleeved stuff hung in the closet and she’d need one today. She couldn’t let her arms be seen for at least another week. 

Ana took a sweatshirt from her closet and pulled it on over her tee. It was one of David’s old ones and had a Batman symbol on it. Ana did not like Batman. Superheroes were like Santa Claus; they did not exist, or if they did, they didn’t think Ana Stark existed. Either way, she didn’t like them, but David loved them, so it was all Ana ever had.

Mom was still in the kitchen when Ana finished tying her shoes (they were also David’s hand-me-downs and too big, but they fit okay with a little toilet paper wadded up in the toes), so she took her backpack over to the window and double-checked to make sure she had her homework and all her books. She knew she did. It was the last thing she did every night before she went to sleep, but last night had been…different…and she wanted to be extra-sure. 

There was a spare t-shirt and a pair of jeans rolled up small in the bottom of her backpack. Ana took them out and folded them away back in her trunk. Then she sat on it, hugging her backpack to her chest and wiping away silent tears as she waited for Mom to leave.

When the front door slammed, Ana went out to the kitchen. She poured herself a bowl of cereal and ate it dry; there was no milk, only Mom’s coffee creamer and she knew better than to ever touch that again. She made herself a lunch from the mostly empty fridge and cupboards—a slice of bread with ketchup and mustard smeared on it, a little baggie with stale crackers in it and another little baggie with green olives—knowing David would give her some of his. Aunt Easter made him extra-big lunches and he always came to find her at middle recess, even though he was in the sixth grade and she was stuck in fifth. 

As always, whenever her mind turned in this direction, the cold thought came to her that next year, David would be away at Elizabeth Gaskell Middle School and Ana would be alone at George WM Reynolds Elementary, with no lunches and no one to sit with in the library or at field days and assemblies. She’d heard there was no recess at middle school, just classes and lunch-times that the different grades didn’t share. She might see him in the halls and bike home with him on the weekends, but that was it. He’d make other friends. He’d forget her. He’d grow up and marry someone else. 

She did not cry again. The fear was too great to cry over. She put her lunch in a plastic bag from the store and put that in her backpack. She put her backpack on her back and snapped the snap to keep it on. She turned off all the lights, even the one in her Mom’s bedroom, knowing she might get in trouble for going in there, but knowing also she’d get in trouble for leaving the light on. She locked the front door and went out through the garage, struggling her bike down off the wall where she kept it hung up out of Mom’s way and carried it out through the so-called garden door, even though the house didn’t have a garden, just a bunch of weeds and grass. 

There were a couple of bigger kids standing out at the ends of their driveways, waiting for the high school bus, but all the elementary school kids were still inside, eating their breakfasts and maybe even still in bed. They could do that if they took the bus, but Ana didn’t like the bus. Kids made fun of her. Her clothes never fit and she got teased a lot for wearing stuff too worn-down or too boyish. Some kids said she never brushed her hair, but she did. She just didn’t fuss over it in girly ways and it was all naturally shaggy and curly and never laid flat, no matter how many times she brushed it. Some kids said her mom was crazy and that meant she was crazy too, and Ana didn’t know what to say to that. She was afraid it might be true.

Ana pedaled six blocks to Main Street and two blocks east to wait for David at their usual place by the bank, because the bank had a clock out front. She lived in town, in a cul-de-sac with lots of other houses as small as hers and some that even looked as ratty, but not many. David and Aunt Easter lived far, far away—from Cawthon all the way out to where there was only a few houses and some pastures, then on Old Quarry Road and out past the rocky pit where she and David liked to play (although not as often now. The water never drained all the way away, even in the summer time, and it smelled worse and worse every year), and onto the dirt road that went forever through the rocks and pines and over the gully, ending at just Aunt Easter’s house because there was nothing else around for miles. She and David biked together to school from this point almost every day and tonight, because it was Friday, she’d bike all the way home with him to that lonely house in the dark woods and bike all the way to school again on Monday. 

And maybe someday, it would be like that every day. They’d be a real family and not just the one Ana pretended she had. David could be her brother until they grew up and she could marry him. Aunt Easter would be her new mom. Someone had told her once that you didn’t have to stay in the family you were born into. You could make your own. And she believed it, with all her heart. But before you could have the new one, the old one had to be gone.

But Foxy hadn’t come last night.

And David wasn’t coming now.

Where was he? She didn’t have a watch, but every few seconds, the bank’s clock showed her the passing of time. Ana waited as long as she dared, but she couldn’t be late for school. Regretfully, she got back on her bike and started pedaling. It was a grey day, after all. Cool and damp. Maybe Aunt Easter had given him a ride. If they’d seen her, they would have stopped to pick her up, but they didn’t always see her. They probably had to go to the gas station or the store or something first. It was okay. Everything was okay.

Ana’s vision blurred, but she blinked it clear. Couldn’t cry while she was on the bike. She might fall off and get hurt. Mom said Ana fell off her bike a lot, but she didn’t. She was a very careful biker.

David wasn’t waiting for her out by the flagpole when Ana arrived at school, but that was all right. She’d waited too long on the street corner by the bank and kids were already going in to class. She put her bike in the strut and locked it—just a regular chain and dollar-store padlock, rusty and dumpster-looking next to all those colorful locks—running her eyes over the rest of the bikes and not seeing David’s. If Aunt Easter had given him a ride to school, she must be coming by to pick him up, too. 

But it was Friday. Ana and David always went home together on Fridays. Always.

Then Aunt Easter would pick Ana up also. It was nothing to get nervous about. Everything was all right.

For the first time, the Awful Thought stole into her heart: Foxy hadn’t come…or had he?

The bell for the start of school rang. The principal came on with the morning announcements. All the kids who hadn’t already gone in now went at a run, because when she was done talking, all the kids who weren’t in their seats would be marked tardy. David still hadn’t come and Ana didn’t know what else to do except go to class, so that was what she did.

Her first class was Reading, which was mostly silent, because it was Mr. Ulster and Mr. Ulster usually had a headache first thing in the mornings. He gave homework, which he rarely did, but it was a Friday and everyone gave homework on Fridays. But that was okay, because it was just to read the next story in her textbook and answer the four questions about it. Ana was a good reader and had already read her entire story textbook (as well as David’s), but she was so tired and the Awful Thought made her stomach feel sick, and between the two, she could not concentrate. She pulled out a piece of paper and carefully printed her name, the date, and First Period up in the corner, then wrote in the title of the story—Treasure Island—and a number 1 so she wouldn’t forget. After that, while every other kid in class did their homework now to keep their weekend free, she sat and watched the clock.

It was the longest wait of her life, longer than the last day of school before a whole glorious summer at Aunt Easter’s house, longer than the night she’d had to spend in the hospital that one time, longer than any night in the closet.

When the bell rang, Ana went outside with the other kids for first recess long enough to look at the softball field—sixth grader territory. He wasn’t there and Ana didn’t know any of the sixth graders well enough to ask if any of them had seen David, so she ran clear across the yard and out to the flat, sandy area that was allegedly the ‘track’ field, but which was really just the fifth grader district, in case David was looking for her. He wasn’t, and before she had time to check the library—She should have gone to the library first! Stupid!—the bell rang.

Second period was Social Studies with Mrs. Pierce. When Ana filed by her desk to hand in her paper (all about the history of Mammon, which amounted to six paragraphs of ‘Mormons are sure great!’ because Mrs. Pierce wore a beehive pin and she had already warned the whole class that anyone who mentioned ghosts of hungry miners in the quarry would get an automatic zero), Mrs. Pierce asked her if she was okay. She said she was, but Mrs. Pierce’s eyes were moving over the bruised and scratched places on Ana’s face where she hadn’t been able to hide it under her hair. 

“Are you sure?” Mrs. Pierce asked, now actually reaching like she wanted to move Ana’s bangs and look at the whole thing.

Ana stepped back and said, “I’m fine!” loud enough that other kids looked at them. Putting her head down and shaking it so that her hair fell more thickly around her face, Ana went to her desk and waited out the time under Mrs. Pierce’s nerve-wracking stare.

Third period was Math with Mrs. Kellar, who was a b-i-t-c-h, so even though Math was Ana’s best subject, it was also her worst class. Mrs. Kellar gave out homework every day and quizzes every Friday and Monday. She was tall and thin and clapped her hands a lot to get kids’ attention and sometimes slapped her hand down on the desk, which made a loud noise, and then yelled at them if they jumped. She kept hard math—the kind the big kids did, all numbers and letters mixed together—written on the blackboard and if you did something she considered ‘bad’ in her class, she’d make you get up and try to solve it, and she’d keep you there all period long, just looking at those letters and numbers, until the bell rang. 

Mrs. Kellar had done that to Ana once, but only once, because Ana knew the magic of the letters, the letters that could be any number, every number, and she solved that problem right away. Ana could do any kind of hard math, even fractions, and she could do it in ink. David was the same way, although he didn’t always get perfect scores on his assignments. Ana thought he was doing that on purpose, because the other kids made fun of kids who got too many perfect scores. They made fun of Ana for that too, but they were already making fun of her for other stuff, so who cared? David cared, though, so David was sneaky, always missing one or two obvious answers, even on quizzes and tests. But he was good, whether he acted like he was or not. 

In fact, David could do things with numbers that even Ana couldn’t understand, using them in his computer in some mystical fashion that turned them into programs. Ana didn’t understand the point of most of his computer programs, but he’d made one that said anything out loud when you typed it into a command box (even if you told it to say “butts” or “boobies”), and that was kind of fun still, even if they’d made it say all the dirty words they knew already. He had also made lots and lots of games, most of them pretty primitive by today’s standards, with graphics resembling those on his old Atari console rather than the SNES and Playstation currently plugged into the TV in his room, but they were still fun and worked just like real computer games. Aunt Easter called it his knack and said it was no different than how Ana could take things like the broken toaster apart and put it back together so it worked again. But that wasn’t a knack at all, that was just how things worked. She wasn’t special, not the way David was.

Where was he?

Mrs. Kellar’s hand slammed down on the desk in front of Ana, shattering her thoughts and making her jerk her pencil across her math sheet, tearing it. The other kids stared at her as Mrs. Kellar yelled at her for not paying attention. Someone threw a wadded bit of paper at Ana when the teacher moved on up the rows of desks, but Ana just picked it out of her hair and did her math. Her heart was too full of that sick fear to feel embarrassed. If she found David—When she found him, they could tell each other mean things about what a fat b-i-t-c-h Mrs. Kellar was, but until then, Ana kept quiet.

When the bell rang, Ana was first out the door, not quite running but walking very fast to the lunchroom, but she didn’t eat her lunch. She was hungry and she knew it in a vague, sideways sort of way, but her stomach was all knotted up and she didn’t think she could keep her lunch down even if she ate it. She stood in the corner where she could see both sets of doors and the lunch line and watched until the steady stream of kids slackened and she knew for sure David wasn’t there. 

He wasn’t there.

Like Foxy hadn’t been there last night. And just maybe the reason Foxy hadn’t come…had been because he’d been somewhere else.

When Mr. Fitzgerald, the janitor, came in to start emptying the first full bags of trash, he asked if she was okay. It wasn’t until she heard her voice shake telling him she was fine that she realized she was crying. Scrubbing at her eyes, Ana left and went to the library, still not running but walking even faster. 

The library wasn’t very big, so Ana could see from the moment she walked in that David wasn’t there either, but she looked anyway. David almost never went outside, preferring to spend his middle recess in here on the computers. He had a better computer at home, but he said he liked the library ones. He only said that because Ana didn’t have a computer and she liked to use these to type her homework on, because teachers loved it when you typed stuff. Almost every day, they’d be here, Ana typing and David playing one of the educational games the school provided, laughing and talking back and forth until Mr. Engleston had to tell them to be quiet.

But not today. Not today.

Ana sat at one of the computers, holding her backpack on her lap, and watched the door, occasionally wiping at her eyes, until the bell rang.

Fourth period was Ana’s study period, with Mr. Ulster again. She sat and pretended to read for a while, then put her head down on the desk and pretended to sleep while she hid in her arms and silently cried.

For fifth period, she had Mrs. Pierce again for English. Ana turned in her vocabulary words, keeping her eyes down so Mrs. Pierce wouldn’t see how red they were, and sat down at her desk, already taking out a fresh piece of paper for the spelling quiz Mrs. Pierce always gave on Fridays. The first word was ‘consequence’. 

When the bell rang for last recess, Ana could only put her head down on her desk and sleep. Mrs. Pierce woke her with a hand on her back just before the bell rang to end recess and asked her again if she was okay. Ana again said she was, but she couldn’t go anywhere. She had Mrs. Pierce for sixth period too—Science—and even though that was her second-best subject next to Math, she was no good at all that day. She looked at her textbook, pushing her tired eyes over words without reading them, and just waited for the bell. Homework was to pick an animal, any animal in the world, and write a full report, which for Mrs. Pierce meant at least two pages and one picture. This news was met with groans by the whole class, except for Ana, who put her head back down on her desk.

After a while, with the whole class quiet so everyone could hear, Mrs. Pierce touched Ana’s back and said, “Aren’t you feeling well, honey?”

“I’m not your honey,” said Ana into her arms. 

Mrs. Pierce took her hand away, but didn’t leave. “Do you need help?”

Someone in the classroom whispered, “Mental help,” and several kids snickered. 

Ana sat up and mutely pulled out a piece of paper. She printed her name, date, and Sixth Period, then stared at Mrs. Pierce until she walked away. 

There were lots of animals she’d love to write about under normal circumstances—squids, platypuses, armadillos, hedgehogs, and just every kind of dinosaur—but she was tired and the Awful Thought was eating her up, so in the end, she went with the trapdoor spider, because she and David had found one last week in the quarry and she had the advantage of real, live photographs she could include in her report. Teachers loved crap like that. Also, trapdoor spiders were cool. They dug out little homes underground and covered them over with dirt so other bugs couldn’t see it. Some bug would just come strolling along, thinking everything was hunky-dory, and suddenly, a spider would jump out of em-effing nowhere and snatch them. In fact, that would be the title of Ana’s essay. She printed it out so she wouldn’t forget, centered in the middle of the page in all-capital letters: SUDDENLY, A SPIDER!!! With three exclamation points, so Mrs. Pierce would know it was serious.

The other kids were leaving as Ana folded her future report away with the rest of her homework papers, and when the room was empty except for Ana, Mrs. Pierce came over and squatted down next to Ana’s desk.

“Are you all right, sweetie?” Mrs. Pierce asked, because she was always asking, whether Ana had bruises or not.

Ana put her textbook into her backpack and zipped it up. “I’m fine,” she said. “I have to go.”

“Is everything all right at home?”

“What do you mean?” Ana asked, looking Mrs. Pierce right in the eye, her heart so full of fear that she didn’t even care what happened to her next. If Mrs. Pierce asked her if her mom was crazy like the kids said, well, the heck with it, Ana would just say, ‘Yes, I really think she is and what are you going to do about it, huh? What do any of you stupid darn—stupid damn!—grown-ups ever do about it? Nothing, that’s what! All you’ll do is call my mom and get me in more trouble!’

But Mrs. Pierce didn’t ask, so Ana didn’t say it and at last, Mrs. Pierce stood up and moved back out of Ana’s way, allowing her to shoulder her backpack and walk out.

Her bike was the only one left in the struts when Ana got out to the front of the school and the last of the yellow buses was already pulling away. She waited by the flag pole as all the rest of the kids trickled out of the school and across the parking lot and were gone. Then came the teachers. Some of them looked at her as she stood by herself below the snapping flags—the Stars and Stripes, the Beehive, and the DARE banner boasting that George WM Reynolds Elementary was drug-free—but none of them came over to ask why she was still there.

It got later. Darker. It was November and the sun went down early. When the streetlamps came on, Ana gave up and went back to the school doors. They were locked, but she could see Mr. Fitzgerald inside sweeping the hall and when he heard her knock, he came to let her in.

“I need to use the phone,” she said, trying and failing to keep the tears out of her voice and off her cheeks. “Can I please come in?”

He walked with her to the short row of pay phones and stood by while she looked helplessly at them, then reached into his own pockets and took out some coins.

She dialed Aunt Easter’s house first. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang, but David never answered. 

She cried then, really cried, with big tears and breaths and even a little noise, although not much. Mr. Fitzgerald shifted like he wanted to do something, but he didn’t do anything but look at her. Grown-ups weren’t supposed to touch kids, especially men and little girls. Ana knew this from the Stranger Danger assemblies. She also knew that a lot of teachers and even some kids didn’t like Mr. Fitzgerald. He used to be a teacher here when Ana was still in kindergarten, but his son had got hurt bad a few years ago. At Freddy’s, the kids said, but they always said that whenever anyone got hurt bad or disappeared and since lots of kids disappeared in Mammon, someone was always saying it happened at Freddy’s. Either that, or the ghosts of the miners down in the quarry ate them up. 

Anyway, something had happened and Mr. Fitzgerald had done something bad because of it and now he was the janitor. Ana didn’t know what the bad thing he’d done was, but she sure knew that touching a little girl, even to give a crying one a hug, was just as bad if not worse. They had already made him stop teaching; if he got in trouble again, Mr. Fitzgerald would probably have to stop being the janitor too.

So Ana cried and Mr. Fitzgerald stood and watched her, wiping at his mouth now and then with the dirty rag he kept in his pocket and looking off down the halls. When she was done crying, she opened up the big yellow book chained to the wall and looked up the number for Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. She was afraid she wouldn’t find it. A lot of pages were ripped out. But the business section was still more or less intact and it was there, although some kid had drawn a big cartoon bear over the whole page, one with sharp teeth and claws, with all-black eyes that looked like sockets in a skull. Freddy Lives said words that dripped like blood.

Ana wiped her eyes one more time and dialed, picking out the numbers where the lines of the mean-looking drawing cut across them. She held the heavy handset to her ear and listened as it rang. Once. Twice. Three times. And just when she thought no one would ever answer, someone did. 

“Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. Our business hours are currently eleven to five. We are closed. Please call back tomorrow.”

Even before the relief had fully hit, Ana could feel it cracking. That was her aunt’s voice, it could be no other, but there was something wrong with it. She didn’t know how, but there was.

“Aunt Easter?” she said cautiously.

“Ana.” A pause, scarcely longer than a heartbeat. “Honey.” Another pause. “How are you?”

Wrong. All the right words, but said so wrong. She got like this sometimes—still smiling on the outside, but sad and far away on the inside—and when she got like this, the things she said didn’t always make sense.

“I called your house, but no one answered.” 

“No,” said Aunt Easter in that same vague way. “I’m here. Everything’s all right, I’m just…working late tonight.”

What to say next? Just the fact that Aunt Easter was at work meant everything was normal. If he was home sick, she’d be with him. Ana hesitated, then plunged ahead. “David wasn’t at school today.”

“I know, honey. He’s here with me.”

There? At Freddy’s? While Ana was making herself sick wondering where he was, David was, what, just watching the band? She’d missed lunch while he was eating pizza. She’d been running all over the playground looking for him while he was playing video games in the arcade? Here stood Ana with snot on her face from crying and David was just at Freddy’s with his mom the whole time!

She didn’t believe it. Ana knew David went to Freddy’s a lot, just like he knew she could never go, but he’d never ditched school just to go there. Why would he? His mom worked there and before she’d worked there, she’d worked at the other one. Probably every single day that David wasn’t hanging out with Ana after school, he was at Freddy’s, so why would he ditch a whole day of school just to do what he did all the time anyway?

“Why?” Ana asked, because she knew there had to be a reason and when she heard it, she’d feel a little silly and a little stupid, but in the meantime, none of this made any sense and it was scaring her.

But Aunt Easter said, “It was just time, sweetheart. Sometimes things just have to change,” and that was no kind of reason at all. 

“What things?” Ana asked, but something in her must have already known, because a tear fell out of her. She could feel it, burning all the way down her cheek, but she didn’t dare let go of the phone to rub it away.

Was there a shudder in Aunt Easter’s next breath? There might have been, but there was a little static on the line that made it impossible to know for sure. In any case, her voice was steady, if sad, when she said, “David won’t be going to school anymore. He’s going to stay with his father from now on.”

With his father? What father? David didn’t have a father, any more than Ana did. But then, lots of kids in Ana’s class had two sets of parents and had to split their time between them, sometimes just on weekends and sometimes over the whole summer. Some of them even had new moms and dads that went with the old halves, and new sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and grandparents and even dogs and cats they only saw sometimes. They didn’t always want to go, but when did that ever matter? Kids had to go where grown-ups told them to go and if David had a father who wanted him, David had to go.

“What…What happens to me now?” Ana asked finally. It was all she could think to say. 

“Oh, honey. Honeybunny, you’ll be just fine.”

Honeybunny? Aunt Easter hadn’t called her that in years. That was her baby name, from the days when she’d been Honeybunny and David had been Honeybear. Hearing it now—when she was all of ten fricking years old!—confused and terrified her.

The static on the line was getting louder, popping and crackling in Ana’s ear loud enough to hurt a little. Aunt Easter started to say something else, but she stopped and maybe put a hand over the phone because her next words were muffled: “Is he awake? Can I see him?”

Someone must have answered, but the static distorted the sound into something impossibly deep and rough. Rotten, somehow. Rusted. 

“No,” Aunt Easter replied. “No, it’s Ana. Please, can I—”

The voice came closer and with it, the static, filling Ana’s skull like a swarm of angry bees through which words came and went, echoing and obscured, like the footsteps of a monster in the movies she and David weren’t old enough to watch yet, but still did.

The silence that followed was of that peculiar kind that did not happen just because someone put the phone down, but switched it to that dead space where nothing happened and no time passed. Ana waited and Mr. Fitzgerald waited with her. The phone book was still open across her bent arm, pressed between her thin body and the wall; Mr. Fitzgerald looked at the drawing and did not blink or even seem to breathe.

At last, the phone clicked and came alive again. The static was gone and it was just Aunt Easter’s voice, soft and sad, trying to sound as if she were smiling when she said, “Are you there, Honeybunny?”

Ana squeezed a sound of assent through her too-tight throat, gripping the phone with both hands to hold it, and herself, steady. 

“We had a…a bad connection for a moment there, didn’t we? Sometimes it can be hard to say things over the phone.” Aunt Easter took another of those shuddery breaths and said, too brightly, “Why don’t you come over? Come…Come to Freddy’s, sweetheart.” 

“I can’t,” Ana stammered, startled even deeper into that heavy apprehension that was eating up her heart. Aunt Easter knew Ana couldn’t go to Freddy’s. She’d been there the one time Ana had tried. 

“It’ll be our secret,” Aunt Easter said soothingly. “Your mother will never know. It’s after hours, no one is here to see you. We’ll have the whole place all to ourselves. You can play all the games as long as you want and see all the shows. We’re all having such a good time, but it’s not the same without you.”

All? All who? David and Aunt Easter…and who? David’s stupid new father? Ana squeezed her eyes shut tight, trying to hate him, this man she didn’t know, this man who’d just up and decided after all these years that he wanted a little boy…but she couldn’t.

If only he wanted a little girl, too. 

“Can I talk to him?” Ana asked. “To David? Please?”

Aunt Easter did not answer for several seconds and when she did, her voice was the wrongest it had ever been, although she still said all the right things and sounded like she said it with a smile. “He’s sleeping, honey. Why don’t you just come over? I’m sure he’ll be awake by the time you get here and I know he’ll want to see you.”

“I don’t think I’d better,” said Ana, for whom Freddy’s was the golden city she yearned for every hour of every awful day. “It’s dark and my bike doesn’t have a light. I should just go home.”

Static, soft as the hand that lurks underneath the open-stepped stairs, waiting to close around the unprotected ankle of little girls who walk down into dark places. 

“All right,” said Aunt Easter, but not to Ana. And not to David, if David was really there and really asleep. For a little while, the only sounds were soft breathing and the whispering of the static. Then the static stopped again and in this new unsettling silence, Aunt Easter said, “Should I come and get you?”

Ana could think of no way to say no, and just the thought that she wanted to made her feel sick to her stomach. This was Aunt Easter and Aunt Easter loved her, so she said, “Okay.”

“You go on home then and I’ll be there as soon as I can. I just have to…to clean up a few things first. But I won’t be long.” And then, with a normalness and rightness that made all the wrong so much wronger, she said, “Be careful in the dark, honey. I worry about you in the dark.”

Aunt Easter hung up her end of the phone, so Ana did too. Mr. Fitzgerald was still staring at the picture in the phone book and didn’t stop until Ana closed it. He blinked and raised his head, then looked at her.

“I have to go now,” she told him. “Thank you for the money.”

This was where she was supposed to promise to pay him back, but she knew she never would.

He seemed to understand that, because he didn’t ask. He just said, “Is someone coming to pick you up?” 

“Yes,” she lied.

He nodded, even though she could see he didn’t believe her, and took her to the doors. He started to unlock them, then stopped and just stood there, his head down and his hand shaking on the hundred keys that hung from the big ring he carried clipped to his belt.

Ana waited, fidgeting from one foot to the other, not scared, but intensely aware of how empty the school was and how far away from other houses.

“You are going home, aren’t you?” Mr. Fitzgerald said, his eyes shut tight. “You’re going straight home and you’re not going anywhere else.”

“Yes, sir.”

Now he looked at her, but she wasn’t sure he saw her. His eyes seemed to go right through her and straight on, through the walls and through the whole town, out into the desert. “Don’t ever go there,” he said. “Don’t you ever go there.”

“Where?” asked Ana, trying to sound like she didn’t know.

Mr. Fitzgerald didn’t hear her any more than he saw her, but he answered. “They look fun. Oh yes, they do. They sing and they dance…but he’s still a bear and bears will bite. Don’t you ever go there.” 

Then he let her out, and as soon as the door was open even a little, Ana bolted through and was running away, her too-big shoes slapping on the damp pavement. He didn’t chase her. He just locked the doors again, watching through the glass as she got on her bike and pedaled away.

Halfway home, it started raining. Cars splashed her as they passed her by and sometimes honked to let her know it was too late for her to be biking without lights. The November wind snapped through the wet streets, freezing the water through her clothes and into her skin. She tried to keep her mind off the cold—both the outside kind and the inside kind—by thinking of all the homework that was waiting for her, but it didn’t work. Oddly, it was the science essay that kept coming back. Trapdoor spiders. There you were, just pedaling along on a dark street, and suddenly, a spider.

 

# * * *

 

Mom still wasn’t home when she walked her bike up the driveway and let herself in by the garden door. Ana wasn’t sure what her mother did for work. She didn’t wear a uniform like Aunt Easter, just normal clothes and she didn’t come home at the same time every night. Sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she didn’t come back until the next day and once, she’d been gone almost a whole week. Anytime, for any reason, the door could slam open and there she’d be.

Ana hung her bike up and took her backpack off. She left it in the kitchen while she went to her room and changed into dry clothes, then came back and took out the lunch she hadn’t eaten. The crackers were all crunched, as were the olives, and the sandwich was soggy, but she put everything together and ate it anyway. She was still hungry when she finished, but she didn’t bother to make herself anything else. Aunt Easter would be here soon and she always had leftover pizza after work. Ana had only eaten her gross, smushed lunch because she’d already stolen the food that went into making it and if Mom came home and found that food untouched in the trash, Ana would be in big trouble.

Mom thought everything Ana did was bad. Mom hated her. Hated her. But Aunt Easter loved her. Aunt Easter hugged her and called her honey (but not Honeybunny, her dark side whispered, not in years and that was still scary) and told her she was so smart and promised someday they’d be a real family. And right now, Aunt Easter was coming to get her. There’d be pizza in the car and she and David could have a slice while Aunt Easter drove them home and they’d all talk and laugh together over how worked up Ana had gotten, just because David wasn’t at school.

She wished she believed that. Any of that. And especially that David would be waiting for her in the backseat of Aunt Easter’s car. 

Where was he? She didn’t like wondering, because it meant she didn’t believe Aunt Easter when she’d said he was safe with her at Freddy’s, but she did wonder. Where was he? Was he really at Freddy’s? And if he was (oh, she hated thinking it), was he really safe? 

She couldn’t think about it anymore, so Ana did her homework, beginning with her reading assignment, getting the worst out of the way first. Ana had already read Treasure Island—the real book, not just this fake cut-up version of it—and she normally liked any story that had pirates in it, but not today. Today, every pirate was Foxy, the Black Spot was under her mother’s mattress, and Ana was marooned and alone, without even a ship to watch sailing away. She answered the questions the way she thought Mr. Ulster would want them answered, although she secretly suspected he never read them at all, just checked to make sure there was writing in the right number of places. Mrs. Pierce was harder to fool, though. She had to make sure all her weekend vocabulary words were not only spelled right, but used right.

Disappeared, she wrote, printing neatly. Last night, my cousin disappeared.

And then the front door banged open. Really banged. Something in the living room fell over and broke, and Mom didn’t even stop to swear at it. 

Ana froze, her hand still poised above the next line on her paper and trembling just a little in the air as she stared at the kitchen door, knowing Mom would come here next. The kitchen had the phone, the booze, and Ana herself; no matter what Mom wanted, she was coming here. If Ana ran, if she made Mom chase her, it would only be worse when she got caught. There was no way out. All she could do was make it so it didn’t hurt as much or last as long and that meant she had to sit right here and wait for it.

The kitchen door banged open, even louder than the front door. Mom put up one hand against the light, then lowered it and looked at Ana. Her angry face turned angrily confused. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Ana’s mouth moved, but she didn’t—couldn’t—speak. That was dangerous, but it was just as dangerous to answer. Ana didn’t know what to do.

“It’s Friday, isn’t it?” Mom’s eyes shifted to the calendar over by the phone. It was still set to September. “Isn’t it Friday?”

Ana nodded.

Mom’s face had begun the scary shift away from confusion and back toward just angry. “Then what the fuck are you doing here?”

“David…”

“What?” 

“D-D-David…”

“What? Speak up! God damn it, why are you always mumbling? What about David?”

But Ana couldn’t finish. 

Exasperated, her mother stomped out of the doorway and grabbed Ana’s arm for a good shake. “Answer me when I ask you a fucking question! Why do I always have to hit you before you start to listen?”

“David wasn’t at school,” said Ana, her heart beginning to beat faster and her skin itching, anticipating the slap. Sometimes it stopped at slapping. Sometimes it didn’t. “Aunt Easter’s coming to pick me up.”

Mom looked at the clock, then went over to the phone. She punched at the numbers and waited, muttering and swearing as she took down one of the tall bottles from the cupboard. She had one drink and then another and then said, “Marion. What the fuck is my daughter doing in my house on a Friday night?”

Ana ducked her head and looked at her paper, but did not write the next vocabulary word. 

“That was not the deal…I don’t care! I’ve got plans for this weekend and I’m not letting that little shit fuck it all up! This is so typical. This is just like you. All I wanted to do was come home and relax for five fucking minutes, get something to eat, get off my feet, but no. Now I’ve got to drive her all the way out to your place—what?…What are you talking about? Who’s we?” Her mother’s tone sharpened and her hand gripped the phone harder. “Who’s we, Marion?…Yes, you did. Don’t you fucking try that, I heard you! Who’s we?”

Silence. The sound of her aunt’s voice scratching through the phone was no louder than a mouse in the wall. Her mother’s breath was louder, rougher.

“You’re crazy,” she said at last. “You’re crazy, you know that? He’s dead.”

Ana’s heart stopped cold in her chest. David? No. She believed and did not believe it, both at the same time. David could not be dead. She’d seen him only yesterday, out at the quarry. They’d played together there after school, when they weren’t supposed to go there at all on a weekday, which was why Ana’s mom had to come looking for her and why she had to wear a sweater and hide the scrape on her forehead under her hair and why Foxy was supposed to come last night. But he didn’t. And he hadn’t gone anywhere else either, she told herself, breathing hard and fast. David wasn’t dead, he was with his father. He wasn’t dead.

“Yes, he is,” Ana’s mom was saying. “You always do this, damn it, and I am not in the fucking mood! It’s been over five years. Get it through your fucking head. He’s not coming back. He’s gone forever and good fucking riddance!” She punctuated this triumphant declaration with a drink, but choked on her first swallow and pushed the phone away from her ear like it had bit her.

Ana heard something. Not her aunt’s voice, made small through the phone. Something else, something awful. It talked. Even at this distance and through the distortion of the handset’s speakers, Ana could tell the sounds she heard were words, but they were broken up, distorted by the electronic clicks and piercing whistles that sometimes overtook the line if there was a radio playing too close. Nonetheless, there were words and that made it a voice and the voice said, “We made a deal, Melanie.” 

“You,” said Ana’s mom in a tiny little voice that made her almost sound like Ana herself. “You…You’re not you. You can’t be you, I know you’re dead.”

Laughter, scratching through the phone, full of static.

Ana’s mom put the bottle down, her knuckles white where she gripped it. Slowly, she put the phone back to her ear, staring into the open cupboard, listening. After a long time, her mother turned around and looked at Ana and her face was like a dead face—white and big-eyed and empty. She didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything, just stared until she was done staring. Then, without a word, she turned away again and looked back at the cupboard.

The static spoke. Ana could no longer hear the words, but she could hear the voice and it talked a long time. She watched, gripping her pen as tightly as her mother gripped the bottle, her chest too full of fear to let her breathe.

“Well, you can’t,” her mother said at last, nearly in a whisper. “No.” And then screamed it, “No! You’re dead and if you aren’t, by Christ, I’ll kill her myself! You hear me? I’ll kill her myself before I let you have her! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Suddenly, her mother was banging down the phone, not into the cradle, but just on the counter, hammering it down over and over until the plastic broke and pieces flew, some of them landing clear over on the kitchen table where Ana sat, frozen. 

Her mother spun around, her eyes wild and chest heaving. 

‘I’m going to die,’ thought Ana and she thought of Mrs. Pierce asking her if everything was all right at home and how she hadn’t said anything. She had all those chances, but she hadn’t said anything. And now she was going to die.

But before she died, Ana screwed up all her little courage and whispered, “Where’s David?”

“He’s gone,” said her mother. And laughed. Not in a funny way or even in a mean way, but in a high, shrill scared way that made it almost sound like she was screaming. “He took him.”

The Awful Thought swelled up like a black bubble and popped and now it was all true. The coin was cursed. She’d known it and she’d put it under her mother’s bed anyway. The coin was cursed, but Foxy didn’t come for the person who had the coin after all. He came for the one who took it. 

And now David was gone.

Her mother looked at the ruins of the phone. Then she swooped away and out the kitchen door, also with a bang. Ana heard the closet open and her stomach clenched in anticipation, but when her mother came back, it wasn’t to grab her and pull her down the hall, but to throw the smaller of two worn suitcases at her, hard enough to hurt. “Go to your room right now and pack.”

“W-What?”

“I said, now!” her mother snapped, already running up the stairs herself to her own room. 

Ana slithered out of her chair onto her feet, staggering under the suitcase. It wasn’t heavy at all, being empty, but it wasn’t much smaller than she was and the handle had broken a long time ago, making it difficult for her short arms to hold. She dragged it up the stairs one step at a time, peeking into her mother’s room as she passed it to see her mother yanking the drawers from her dresser and dumping them out into the suitcase, stomping on them with her foot to make everything fit.

She had been numb all this time, numb without realizing it, thinking she was frightened only until she began to understand what being frightened really felt like.

Ana hurried down the hall as fast as she could and dropped the suitcase on her bedroom floor. She looked around, seeing everything and nothing, knowing in the same unspoken, overwhelming manner of dream-knowledge that this was the last time she would ever be in this room, the last chance she would ever have to take anything with her. She was leaving, not to the store or to school or even to the next town over, but forever and all time. She was being taken. And when children are taken in Mammon, they never come back. Everyone knew that. Never ever _ever._

Something crashed over in her mother’s bathroom, startling Ana out of the hypnotic hold that her thoughts had on her heart. She looked around again, now feeling panic like a caged moth pounding at her ribs. She didn’t have much time.

There, on the wall, in a cheap plastic frame, her Lisa Frank poster of the rainbow-colored seascape with a pegasus flying overhead, streaking light like a comet’s tail from its hooves and feathers.  
Ana’s heart leapt. She ran, tripping over the suitcase and banging her chin on the corner of the old trunk that served as her dresser. She got up bleeding and stumbled to the wall, wiping her chin and her hands before reaching up to pull it down. There were tabs on the frame holding the backing in place and she couldn’t pry them up; she bit her fingernails. 

Ana worried at them through a haze of tears for a few seconds, then rushed over to her mattress and groped beneath it to her hiding place and the little paring knife she kept there. She took it back and used it to pry up the tabs, breaking most of them, and pulled the cardboard backing away. She took the poster out—the real poster, not the stupid pegasus it hid behind, and rolled it up with shaking hands, securing it with an elastic hairband she found on the floor. She put it in her suitcase and, hearing her mother’s footsteps slamming down the hall, desperately buried it beneath a mountain of clean and dirty laundry of all kinds.

Her mother banged open her door in the very next instant and pointed at the suitcase. “Get it. Let’s go. Now!”

Ana shut the lid and zipped it up, then pulled the whole heavy thing into her arms. She dropped it twice on the way out of the house. The first time, Mom let her pick it up again; the second time, she swung around and punched Ana three times in the face and six times on the back and butt as Ana hunched over to weather the storm. Then she ran out without her, leaving Ana to follow after as best she could with her ringing ears and throbbing head.

Mom had left the car pulled all the way up to the door, its tires on the lawn. She grabbed Ana’s suitcase from her and threw it into the back seat with her own, then got behind the wheel. The car began to move before Ana was all the way in, so that she fell into her seat more than sitting on it. She pulled the door closed even as the car bumped over the curb and onto the street in a blare of horns, and buckled her belt while Mom screamed at a lady who had been walking her dog there to get the fuck out of her way. 

The lady stared at Ana, gape-mouthed, as she rode by. Any other day, Ana would have slouched low and tried not to be seen, but not today. She would never see that lady again. That lady would never again see her. Aunt Easter might be coming right this second, but she’d never get here in time. Ana was being taken away and she would never come back. She would never see Aunt Easter again. She would never see David. She would never go to Elizabeth Gaskell Middle School in two years or Blackwood High in five. That life, that promise of a family and a home with hugs and leftover pizza and a bedroom with a TV and a computer or even just a real bed instead of a mattress on the floor and a smelly, stuffy closet, was gone, killed in the night along with David.

It was her fault. It had been his plan, but he’d done it for her, so it was her fault. David was gone and Ana was taken and it was all her fault.

She started to cry, silent, but her mom noticed anyway and smashed her in the face with one wild fist. Ana pressed both hands over her eyes, shivering, until they stopped making tears, then twisted around in her seat to watch her house grow small under the November sky. There were tire tracks in the grass. The front door was wide open. At the end of the dark hall, her homework was still sitting on the kitchen table, with her literature book open to the chapter of Treasure Island where Billy Bones gets the Black Spot and her unfinished vocabulary paper and unwritten essay laid out by her backpack. Last night, my cousin disappeared, it said, and underneath that, SUDDENLY, A SPIDER!!! With three exclamation points, so the cops would know it was serious.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bear with me, folks. Once I get Ana back in her hometown, we’ll see a lot more of Freddy & Friends, but they don’t make an appearance in this chapter. Hope you still enjoy it!
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING! This book contains strong adult themes, including adult language, drug and alcohol references, sexual themes, violence, and scenes of child abuse. I am not kidding. This book should probably not be read by anyone. 
> 
> Five Nights At Freddy’s is the creation of Scott Cawthon. The characters of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Mangle, Toy Freddy, Toy Bonnie, Toy Chica, Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fredbear, Springtrap, Plushtrap, the Puppet, Balloon Boy, and the Purple Guy, as well as Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, belong to him. Everything else is a product of my own imagination and no similarity to actual events, locations, or people is intended or should be inferred. Do not reproduce, repost or copy any part of this story without my permission. 
> 
> As always, a sincere thank you to all those who took the time to rate and review if you liked it (or even if you didn’t like it). If you are interested in my non-fanfiction work, feel free to check out my blog at rleesmith.wordpress.com or look me up on Amazon.

# CHAPTER TWO

_February 11th, 2015_

Ana Stark woke in a cold sweat at half-past six in the morning. Her dream, something to do with spiders and maybe school, was already melting away and she made no effort to call it back. She did not think it had been a nightmare. She was cold because it was forty degrees at the most and she didn’t have the heat on. The sweat was because it had been almost eighty degrees when she’d gone to bed and, trapped beneath the blankets, it had never dried. Here, in the small town of Oxtongue, just outside sunny Death Valley National Park, winter weather was prone to be schizophrenic and waking in a cold sweat was nothing new. 

Ana got up and shambled out to the kitchen in the very adult morning attire of underwear and a t-shirt purporting to be from the Mordor Charity Walkathon (One does not run, the shirt advised), only to discover the pump in the coffee maker had broken. A dilemma: she could either take the time to fix it or take a shower. She fixed the coffee maker, only to discover she was out of coffee. It was going to be another great day in the life of Ana Stark.

On the way to work, the flatbed ahead of her blew a tire and kept right on trucking like the road-hogging asshole he was. Ana, hemmed in on both sides by traffic, had no choice but to roll right over the top of the shredded, wire-studded rubber carnage and pray her own tires held. They did not.

By the time she arrived at the house, Hal and Malcolm were already there, blocking off the driveway so that Ana had to park her truck around the block and walk in, pushing her toolbox on the handcart. More than one curtain twitched aside to see who the hell was making that godawful racket at eight a.m. on a hungover Saturday, but Ana kept her head down and did not respond to the colorful remarks that came her way. She could not afford to be distracted. Today was Shelving Day. 

Built-in shelves and storage were Ana’s thing. Rider called it the Stark Signature. He said just like a painting wasn’t done until the artist signed it, so one of his flips wasn’t ready to sell until it had a fuckton of custom shelves. This meant a lot of fussy detail work, but Ana did not complain. It was the fussy details that made all the difference between flipping a house for profit and flipping it for _profit_. She was thirty years old (and counting), and she did not want to still be flipping meth labs for Rider when she was forty.

Not that she was complaining. It may not be honest work, strictly speaking, but there were a lot worse jobs out there and she ought to know, having done most of them. Rider had always indulged her increasingly infrequent efforts to go straight, perhaps knowing she’d eventually come back and stable herself…and she always had. She was getting too old now to keep trying and maybe he knew that too.

And really, it wasn’t such bad work. Smart, even, if you could call anything about the drug business smart. After all, no matter how careful you tried to be, neighbors noticed when you ran an operation out of your own house and cops noticed when trailers parked themselves out in the middle of nowhere and just sat for a week or two. But when you bought a run-down piece of property, no one thought twice about the steady stream of rough-looking people tromping in and out. No one blinked an eye at weird smells. And no one thought it was odd if you turned around and sold the place again a month later. Flipping was big business these days. If Rider wanted to, he could probably go straight himself, but of course, the money from even the best flip was nothing compared to one good cook, and that was only one of the pies Rider had his fingers in.

Hal and Malcolm had to have heard her come in, but neither of them came up to see who was in the house. Not that many burglars were in the habit of ‘sneaking in’ by pushing a heavy-loaded handcart full of rattling tools over a carpetless floor, but they ought to have at least checked, given the quantities of meth they were cooking up down there. Of course, if she confronted them, they’d only claim they couldn’t hear anything through the chemical suits and breathers they were wearing (which they absolutely did not wear just because the cooks on Breaking Bad wore them and it made them look badass. Hal and Malcolm, even. Those were what meth-heads considered clever fake names), although they could hear her just fine when it was her turn to make the lunch run. They were the best cooks in Rider’s stables and they knew it, which was bad enough, but they also considered Ana’s part in the production process to be minimal and they let her know it. 

Well, they might be good, but Walter White and Jesse Whoeverthefuck, they weren’t. Rider had plenty of other ponies in his stable who could cook, but nobody else did what Ana could do. Ana herself had custom-modified the room they were in right now to make the perfect kitchen—well ventilated, with a dedicated drain into a separate septic tank that could be sealed off once the cook was over and done with. The tank had also been modified so that it would leak its inevitable gases and acids into the ground a good ten feet down, making it unlikely to ever be found. After Hal and Malcolm left, the lab would get a freshly-poured cement floor with a drain into the regular sewer system, some built-in shelves and overhead lights, and the house would have a workshop off the garage that would turn any handyman’s head. This was Ana’s other signature and no one did it better.

But today was Shelving Day. That meant three bedrooms—two with half-height study shelves, a full array in the master, and walk-in closets with storage nooks in all three—the laundry room, the pantry off the kitchen (the kitchen itself, like the bathrooms, would have to wait until she had the counters installed), and the Stark Show-Stopper in the living room. A lot of work for one day, but she could do it. Even as her hands were busy in this bedroom, her mind was in the next room, laying out boards, double-checking measurements committed to memory, and taking inventory of the lumber already on hand. 

Rider liked to say Ana could do more with less than any other horse in his stable and although Rider was full of flattering shit on many occasions, on that one he was dead right. Ana could just look at a heap of lumber and know almost to the inch how many shelves she could get out of it and how best to fit them into available space. She could see it, not with her eyes, but with some just as real other-vision, the same way she could just look at a broken power tool and, nine times out of ten, get it working again. She didn’t have to think about it, she just did it. Her knack, she’d think sometimes, still in Aunt Easter’s voice. Everybody had something that made them special. 

And this was what she’d done with hers.

As Ana finished in the first room, her phone rang. She didn’t hear it, not through her safety earplugs or the shop radio blasting Alestorm off the walls, but when at work, she kept her phone tucked into her bra and set to vibrate so she never missed a call. She prided herself on reliability and even though Rider knew today was Shelving Day, if he needed to run her out on another job, she needed to be there for him. She owed him. She owed him everything.

But the number that came up on her phone’s screen was not any of those Rider used. No contact info and not a local area code. There was still a pretty good chance this was someone who knew her, but if so, they didn’t know her well enough, or they’d know she did not accept cold calls from unlisted numbers. 

Ana tapped the red phone icon, but did not tuck the phone away in her bra again.

Area code 435…why was that familiar?

It probably didn’t matter. 

But it would eat at her the rest of the damn day unless she found out what it meant, so Ana swiped the screen aside and googled it. 

Utah.

Her heart stopped briefly, then started again with a high slam to the inside of her ribs. There was only one person in Utah who would want to find her and Ana could think of only one reason why she would.

David. After all these years, they’d found David.

Ana put her nail-gun down and shut off the shop radio. She closed the lid on her heavy-duty toolbox and sat on it. She looked at the phone, reading the unchanging number it showed her, but not dialing it.

Was that even her aunt’s number? She couldn’t remember, but she had the feeling it wasn’t. She didn’t have many clear memories of Mammon and the accident had hazed over a lot of the ones she did have, but even the things she thought she had lost had a way of coming back if she somehow stumbled on a reminder. She didn’t think she could look right at her aunt’s number—a number she must have called a thousand times in her childhood—and not know it. 

But then…had her aunt moved after David’s disappearance? Or just changed her number? Ana thought so. Now that she was thinking about it, she could vaguely recall being huddled down between the beds at some dingy motel or another, trying to call Aunt Easter while Mom was in the shower, listening to some electronic voice tell her…something. That part wasn’t clear, but it must have been final, because Ana didn’t try calling her aunt again until after the accident and by then, she’d forgotten the number and Marion Blaylock wasn’t listed anymore in Mammon, so that was that. 

Only that wasn’t that, clearly. This was that. This was the day she had been waiting for twenty years and more, ever since the first time she’d seen James Joyce Reardon’s face on the news and read about those other missing children. But David’s name had never been mentioned. He wasn’t dead, couldn’t be buried (well, the others couldn’t be buried either. They had only Reardon’s confession. He’d been killed before he could lead the police to their bodies), had no stone to visit and leave flowers at. Ana had googled him once or twice, but turned up no decades’-old Amber Alerts or APBs. So he wasn’t missing…just gone.

She thought she’d come to terms with that, thought she’d accepted his death without the world ever admitting to it, but now here she was, afraid to call and hear Aunt Easter’s voice, not laughing and loving her and calling her honey, but old and defeated and telling her David’s bones had just turned up.

Not hearing it wouldn’t make it any less real.

And after all…it had been real enough until now, whether his bones were there to be buried or not.

Ana tapped at her One Missed Call notice and let her phone do the dialing. She listened, her eyes shut and chest hollow, as it rang twice before someone picked up.

“Beltran and Blake,” said a voice. A man’s voice.

Confusion swelled. Ana pulled the phone from her ear and checked the number, then put it back to her head, able to think only that her aunt must have married at some point over the last twenty years. Married a man named Beltran? And another one named Blake? Had she just misheard Blaylock? 

The idea that this could have anything to do with _anything_ but David did not and never would occur to her. It had to be David, so this had to be her aunt and so Ana said, “Can I talk to Easter?”

“Who?”

Confusion swept her a second time, knocking her sideways, but still not off her feet. Her aunt’s pet name had, perhaps, also been a good twenty years behind her.

“Marion,” said Ana. “Can I speak to Marion, please? This is Ana.”

“Who?” said the voice again. “Wait…Stark? Is this Anastasia Stark?”

“Yeah. Just Ana is fine, but yeah, that’s me.”

“And you’re calling in regards to…Marion Blaylock?”

Ana’s free hand stole down to grip the corner of her toolbox, as if to anchor herself. She had started to feel distinctly floaty, but she wouldn’t let it show in her voice when she said, “Someone called me from this number. Who are you?”

“My name is Peter Rockwell. I’m calling from the offices of Beltran and Blake, specifically from the collections department. This conversation may be monitored to improve efficiency. Miss Stark, I’ll come to the point. Your aunt’s home is in foreclosure. This phone call is to notify you of your rights—”

“My rights? What do you mean, mine?”

“If you believe you do not hold responsibility for this debt, you must send a written statement to our office’s legal claims department within the next thirty days,” the voice replied. “However, you are the next of kin. You are, in fact, the only living relative as far as we’ve been able to determine. Under state law, this makes you the executor of your aunt’s estate, which, as I remind you, is in foreclosure. You cannot take possession of that property without taking responsibility for those debts, so it is to the benefit of all parties if we set up a repayment plan now, under amicable terms.”

“You’re talking like she’s dead,” said Ana.

Silence.

“Is she dead?” she asked. Aunt Easter’s pretty face fluttered up from her memories, soft-lit and smiling, but it was a face twenty years out of date. What did that make her now? Fifty-something? Fifty wasn’t so old. How could she be dead? “Is she?” she asked again, because the guy on the other end of the line was still quiet.

“Legally, yes.”

“Well, what the hell does that mean, ‘legally’?” Her hand tightened painfully on the blunt corner of her toolbox. “Is she…Was she in an accident or something? Is she, like, on life-support or…?”

“Miss Stark, I have no idea where your aunt is. No one does. All I know is, she’s been declared legally dead and her estate—”

“Can you please stop saying estate like its fucking Wayne Manor and talk to me?” Ana snapped. “Is my aunt missing? Is that what you’re saying? My aunt is missing and your sole concern is who’s going to pay her _debts_?”

The polite veneer over this faceless man’s voice cracked and let some of the steam out: “Our office has legal and financial interests here, yes. I should think it would be a relative’s job to care about the fact that she’s missing or even to know in the first place, especially since it’s been twelve years.”

Now the silence was on Ana’s end.

“What?” she managed, but wasn’t sure if she actually said it or just mouthed it. 

The voice heaved a curt sigh into the phone and said, “Miss Stark, I apologize if that seemed unduly—”

“Twelve _years_?!”

“Our records show she…that is to say…” Another harsh sigh blew across her ear. “Okay, listen, your aunt had set it up so that her bills were automatically deducted from her account. She didn’t have a job to report to, no social obligations…my point is, no one’s sure how long she’d been missing. Someone from the water department came out to read her meter and found the property in a state of severe neglect and reported it, as appropriate. The city attempted to contact her, but it’s not unusual for notices of that sort to be ignored. It was only after they attempted to collect payment for the upkeep of the property that they determined the house to be abandoned.”

“Is she in it?” 

“Ma’am?”

“Have you even sent anyone to look? I mean, after you cut her grass and trimmed her trees and charged her the standard eyesore penalty, did anyone bother to go inside and see if she was…if she needed help?”

“I neither deserve nor appreciate the accusatory tone you’re taking with me, Miss Stark, and if you continue to act in this hostile manner, I will terminate this call.”

‘And I will be in your house in two days, asking my questions in person. You like that better?’ Ana thought, but although she was angry enough to say it, she wasn’t quite stupid enough.

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” she said instead. “I’m not even accusing the bank of anything. I’m just trying to understand the city-minds involved, because this is the first I’m hearing about any of this and I have to hear it from the goddamn bank! Do you understand that?”

“No, actually, I don’t understand it at all. I’m on pretty good terms with my extended relatives. I wouldn’t let twelve years go by without calling to find out if, you know, they’re alive.”

“I was ten!” Ana snapped. “I was ten when my mother moved us away! I knew how to get to her house, I didn’t know her street address! I couldn’t get back to her! I couldn’t write to her! By the time I could call her, she wasn’t answering my calls! This is not my fault!”

More silence. Another sigh. 

“Miss Stark, again, I apologize if I—”

“Apology accepted! I don’t care! I just need to know if I’m going to walk into my aunt’s house and find her dead on the living room floor still reaching for the fucking phone with twelve years of delinquent payment notices stapled to the door!”

“I don’t know,” the man admitted. “Attempts were made to search the property, but…there’s a problem. Your aunt…let things go.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means a thorough search just wasn’t possible, given the condition of the house. But no, I don’t think she’s there. The consensus is, she’s just missing.”

“Just,” Ana repeated, not stinging him with it as much as herself. “Just missing. That’s all. Just.”

“I realize how that sounds, but you have to understand our position. It is not against the law for someone to leave and not tell anyone where. It is against the law to stop paying your bills and eventually, yes, I’m sorry, but that’s what had to be addressed.”

“I understand.”

“Well.” The quiet on his end took on an awkwardly human quality. “I understand your position, too. But that’s the reality here. Your aunt’s obligations could only grow during that period that she was…non-responsive. Under state law, she could not be declared dead for eight years, so the city had to manage the property on her behalf—”

“And they expect to be paid.”

“Yes, they do. Which is reasonable, I might add.”

“I guess,” Ana said grudgingly. “So…is it my math or yours? She’s missing for eight years while the city cuts her grass and the bank keeps tacking interest on to her mortgage, then they declare her dead so, presumably, that all stops, and then another four years goes by before you call me? I know I move around a lot—”

“Yes, you do.”

“But you did find me! Did it really take four years?”

“No,” the voice admitted. “But you may be operating under a misconception that I…may have encouraged. Listen, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but Beltran and Blake is not a member of the Mammon Canyon Credit Union. We’re…We’re a third-party collection agency. We acquired your aunt’s debts last month. Until then, we had nothing to do with her. We’re not even based in Mammon, we’re in Salt Lake.”

“So?”

“So, this isn’t what we customarily do, but it’s a part of the business in this day and age. We snap up secured debts, and if the responsible party doesn’t pay them, we take possession of the collateral, in this case, the mortgage-holder’s property. We pay the outstanding liens, do some cosmetic repairs and sell it for a profit. That’s totally legal,” he interrupted himself.

“Yeah, I’m aware,” Ana said, sitting on her toolbox in the bedroom of a house that had been acquired just that way. “Go on.”

“Well, your aunt’s house is further away than we usually deal with, but it was thirty wooded acres in Mammon Canyon for thirty-eight grand, so we bought it. And then…”

“And then?”

“And then, in investigating the liens placed on the property, we found you,” he said after a long pause. “We’re not comfortable dealing with a missing person’s property as opposed to a foreclosure or an estate sale. If she were to turn up at some point in the future, she could make things very uncomfortable for us and although I’m pretty sure we’d win out if it came to court, the lawyers would take any profit we made from the sale and then some. So here’s the deal. As of this moment, your aunt is legally dead and according to the laws of intestate succession, you are her legal heir and legally empowered to act as executor of her property. So we’re offering to buy your aunt’s estate for one dollar—”

“You’re _what_?”

“—plus, you pay all inspection and closing costs.”

“Bullshit I will!”

“Miss Stark, I guarantee those costs are a mere fraction of what it would take to make that home habitable.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure you have only my best interests at heart, but fuck you, I am not selling that house for a fucking dollar.”

“If you won’t relinquish possession of the property, you need to come down here to deal with it. Either way, as of this moment, our offices will be actively seeking payment on the debts concomitant to that property.”

“Do you honestly think you’re going to squeeze one thin dime out of me?” Ana asked, almost laughing in spite of her very real anger.

“Oh yes,” said the man on the phone with a confidence that had been missing through much of this conversation. “You remember me saying real estate isn’t what we customarily do? Well, this is and we are damned good at it. We are fully prepared to take you to claims court and we _will_ win. We might not get all thirty-eight grand out of you, but I can safely say you will pay easily twice that amount in legal fees fighting us before you lose. We’ll take a cut of every paycheck you ever make from now until the day you die.”

“Good luck with that. The kind of work I do doesn’t always come with a paystub, pal,” said Ana, picking her words through a darkening haze of temper. “And I don’t do my fighting in a court.”

“Are you threatening me?” the man asked, sounding more amused than anything. 

“I’m saying you found me because I wasn’t hiding. If I wanted to disappear, I could.”

“It must run in the family.”

He probably meant it to provoke her, to get her to say something out loud he could play back at her if they did indeed end up in court, which was where he plainly thought they were headed. Instead, her anger blew away like smoke and she was left staring into her half-done shelves, suddenly thinking of David’s bedroom, where she had spent so many weekend nights. He’d had shelves just like this on either side of his bed. Built right into the wall just this way. Aunt Easter had that walk-in closet with all the cubbies and shelves and the rotating pocket-pillar for her shoes. The living room had the custom hide-away entertainment center with the floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side like wings. How had she never thought of that before? She’d been rebuilding their house for years.

Aunt Easter was missing. Not dead, despite what the vultures in the banks might say. Just missing, like David. No one was looking for her. There might be a thousand clues to her whereabouts in that house, just waiting for someone who cared enough to look for them.

She might—oh, she knew she wouldn’t—She might even find her. Her and David together. Alive and well, somewhere, with a wild story to tell about the amazing secret-agent circumstances that had forced them to go away without her.

If nothing else, she could bury them both and put the past to rest.

It was the last thought that decided her, awful as it was. When she spoke again, it was to give the man on the phone her email address and promise she’d be in touch when she knew what she was going to do (but she knew). He warned her again the proceedings were time-sensitive and needed her answer in writing in his hand within thirty days and then he hung up.

Thirty days. Ana’s heart, cold, kept beating while her brain ruthlessly crunched out the numbers. She’d be done with the shelves today. If the doors and windows showed up tomorrow as promised, she’d get them done in a day; if not, she’d replumb the upstairs bathroom and get everything ready to install the counters that were coming on Thursday. That left all weekend for the kitchen renovations and it’d probably take all three days. Next week, all flooring done. By Monday next, the boys would be out of the basement and she could do the final flip-work and the three Ps: polish, paint and pack up. That allowed her an easy ten days to get home.

No, not home. Just Mammon. 

A knock on the doorjamb. Ana raised her head out of the past and saw three guys in the unfinished hall. One of them was carrying a cheap plastic toolbox. Their work-clothes consisted of designer jeans and three-hundred dollar shoes.

“Hey, Sykes,” said Ana, pointing with her chin. “That way, just off the kitchen. Then downstairs, second door on the right. And don’t just barge in. Knock first. Malcolm’s getting twitchy.”

“Got it.” 

The three of them clumped away and Ana went back to staring at her phone, although she kept one ear open for trouble. Sykes was all right and most of the time, so were Hal and Malcolm, but Day Ten of a cook was the traditional jumping-off point for paranoia and the last two pickups had been made by strangers. It had been a few years since things had gone sour at a site where Ana was in charge, but she had no illusions. That just meant she was long overdue.

So she listened, not allowing herself to think about David or what might be waiting on the other side of that unknown number until, sure enough, she heard Malcolm’s voice rising through the floorboards, countered by Sykes, then Hal, then all of them at once.

Ana put her phone back in her bra and got up. She opened her toolbox, put a screwdriver in the back of her belt, tucked a utility knife in her boot, kept a hammer in her hand, and went downstairs.

They heard her coming, to the effect that Hal and Sykes had both drawn off and were glaring at each other from opposing corners of the lab, letting Malcolm and the other two shout the place up by themselves. And under normal circumstances, even they would probably shut up if she gave them the chance to do it without stepping on their big-boy toes, but this was no longer normal circumstances.

Ana walked in and, without stopping or even slowing down, flipped her hammer around and slammed the nearest guy—one of Sykes’s boys—in the kidney with the broad side of the head at her full strength. He dropped to his knees, squirting an involuntary stream of pain-piss through his designer jeans and giving Ana a clear shot at the other. She flipped the hammer again, now holding it by the head, and gave him one to the ear with the wooden haft. As he stumbled back, she jammed the hammer through her belt, then turned to a profoundly startled Malcolm, yanked his breather down and slapped him open-handed across the mouth. He backed up fast; she walked forward.

“I got to come down here?” she asked and slapped him again. “I got to stop what I’m doing to come down here?” Slap. “What is the problem here, huh? What is so goddamn serious that you got to get in a dogfight over it and make me break it up?”

Malcolm rubbed his mouth and glowered.

Ana waited, then hauled back and slapped him again, as hard as she could, nearly knocking him off his feet. Before he’d decided how to react, she had the hammer in her hand again and up where he could see it. “I asked you a question,” she said. “Why do I always have to hit you before you answer?”

“He wasn’t supposed to be here until nine,” Malcolm muttered.

Ana waited some more, but that appeared to be it. “Are you shitting me?” she asked, almost politely. Almost. 

“Rider said—”

“This isn’t a goddamn hair salon!” Ana snapped. “And even if it was, you don’t bitch people out for showing up early, you give them a fucking magazine and tell them to take a seat, and you do it with a fucking smile! Now give the man what he came for and shut the fuck up!” She turned on Hal next. “I am not being paid to babysit and you are not being paid to pick fights with Rider’s fucking distribution network. So you do your job, he’ll do his, I’ll do mine and everybody will happy, got that?”

He mumbled something affirmative through his breather, but his eyes were flat and hard.

Ana turned around, pushing one of Sykes’s boys out of her way like she hadn’t noticed how he’d moved to block her in (but, oh, she had), and got right up in his bubble. “Next time, if there is a next time, show a little goddamn professionalism and be here when you say you’ll be here. If he pulls that fucking thing, he better be a lot faster than I am,” she went on without looking at the boy who had surreptitiously slid his hand under his shirt. “Because I will put this hammer claw-first through your fucking face and pull your goddamn teeth out with it.”

Nobody spoke. Nothing moved but Sykes’s eyes and the boy’s hand, dropping back to his side, empty.

“Get what you came for,” Ana said again, not budging one inch from in front of Sykes. “Leave like gentlemen. You got a problem with any of this, take it up with Rider. That is how we handle things, not by screaming up the goddamn basement at nine in the morning in a residential neighborhood. Excuse me,” she corrected herself with a scathing tone directed at Malcolm, even though she kept her gaze on Sykes. “At half-past eight in the morning.”

Sykes’s other boy picked himself out of his puddle and started loading up Sykes’s toy toolbox. Sykes himself did not move, not even his eyes. He kept his gaze locked with hers until his boys were ready to go. Then he gave them a nod and headed for the door himself, saying, “This isn’t over.”

Hal and Malcolm both stepped back, knowing what was coming. That line had been used on her before.

Ana cracked him one on the back of the head, just hard enough to make him turn around. When he did, bellowing, she gave him two to the ribs with the hammer and one to the gut, then tossed it away as he dropped to his knees, grabbed her screwdriver out of her belt and shut him right the fuck up by touching it to the thin skin under his left eye. “Well?” she prompted.

She waited. They all waited.

“I thought you said this wasn’t over.” 

Sykes’s eye ticced, but only his right eye.

Ana waited some more, then cocked her head. “Is it over now?”

“Yeah,” said Sykes, his lips scarcely moving and his pupil jittering as it tried to focus on the sharp blade of the screwdriver. “Yeah, we’re good.”

“We don’t have to be good,” she told him, keeping the screwdriver where it was. “We just have to have this be over. Because I have work to do and so do you.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay then.” Ana stepped back, but kept the screwdriver in her hand, watchful. “You know how to get a hold of Rider or do you need his number?”

“I got it,” Sykes said sullenly, climbing to his feet.

“All right. I’ll see you later. Have a nice day.” 

Ana waited until they were on the stairs, then moved into the garage and peered through the narrow window set in the rolling door until she saw their car drive away with all three of them in it. Only then did she slip the screwdriver back into her belt and return to the lab. “Is that going to be the only heap of horseshit out of you today or do I have to come back down here for the noon and three o’clock appointments, too?”

“You know, you don’t have to be such a bitch all the time,” Malcolm grumbled, hunching over his stove.

Ana snorted. “Holy shit, is _that_ the wrong answer.”

“We’re fine,” said Hal, also pissed, but hiding it better.

“Good. I’m going to get back to work then. You need me, holler.”

Two turned backs and the sound of mutters muffled by breathers were her only answer and not an unexpected one. Ana left them to it, collected her hammer and started upstairs. The first pick-up was made, the cooks were cooking, her aunt was missing, David was still dead and Ana Stark had a lot of shelves to put up.

# * * *

 

At the end of that long day, after the sun had gone down and this miserable corner of California had cooled off, Ana finished wiping down the last shelf. Hal and Malcolm had left hours ago, but theirs was a job that could be picked up and left off whenever they wanted. Today was Shelving Day and Ana Stark did not leave a job half-done. 

She collected her truck and brought it to the door so she wouldn’t have to rattle her toolbox down the sidewalk, double-checked every room to make sure she had all her tools and double-checked every door to make sure they were all locked, then put herself behind the wheel and headed home. She stopped once for gas and again for a can of coffee and one more time for burgers, cursing herself for spending her hard-earned money on another cheap bag of crap when she had groceries going bad back home. Her fridge was full of good intentions, but she always ended up at the drive-thru. She was a horrible human being. For a number of reasons, but that was the one she focused on tonight.

There were bills waiting for her in the mailbox when she arrived at the duplex she currently called home, a pleasant reminder that she had been living in one place long enough to rack up bills. Her neighbors, the Fighting Fitzroys, were home and screaming at each other. This, she knew, would last until they had accumulated enough passion for the make-up sex, which would involve even more swearing and banging around. She’d been here longer than she ever meant to stay and as soon as the flip was done and she knew where the next flip was going to be, she had every intention of leaving. Not that the new place was likely to be much better. Ana had been in Rider’s stables, off and on, longer than any other pony he owned, and he took very good care of her financially, but money wasn’t all that mattered.

Ana could do the work of a carpenter, electrician, plumber and mechanic, but she was licensed for none of it. Her credit history reflected the life she had on paper: a high school drop-out who bounced from menial job to menial job and who had failed surprise piss-tests on more than one occasion. She had a shoebox full of cash hidden in the wall behind a false panel, but she couldn’t pay everything in cash and couldn’t take a shoebox to the bank and tell them to put it in her account without raising some eyebrows. Oh, she could make it easier on herself, take the bit and the saddle and let Rider take care of her, but it would mean never breaking free of him. She was thirty years old (and counting, always counting) and the odds of ever leaving him behind were about the same as her getting her GED and her Apprenticeship and going straight for real—plausible, in other words, but slipping every day further and further into the mists of Fantasyland.

Never mind. Ana put her bills on the kitchen table and went down the hall, peeling out of her sweat-soaked, sawdust-caked clothes as she went, but draping each article over her arm until she reached the bedroom and could dispose of them in the hamper. She took fresh clothes from the dresser—jeans on the left, tees on the right, panties in the middle—and took them into the tiny bathroom. She set them on the back of the toilet with her cell phone on top and climbed into the tub, slid the cracked door shut, turned on the tap and pulled the shower knob. Water rattled in the pipes and hit her in the face as she set the waterproof timer mounted to the wall for three minutes in deference to the drought.

The sound of the shower pounding in the enclosed space was agreeably deafening. Ana stood unmoving, staring at the broken tiles in front of her face as cool water poured down her cheeks like tears. Something broke on the wall on the Fitzroy’s side of the duplex. She thought she ought to chip out those tiles and replace them, but why do the landlord’s job for him? She thought she shouldn’t have bought those burgers, since she knew she wasn’t going to eat both of them. She thought it was about time to bag her hamper up and take it down to the laundromat. 

She thought the only two people who had ever really loved her were gone. 

When the timer beeped, Ana shut the water off and got out of the shower. There was a text from Rider waiting for her on her phone’s screen. _Come over. I got pizza._ She texted _omw_ and started dressing. She left the bills on the table to be dealt with when she got back, but took the burgers with her. Odds were she was in for a long night and Rider may or may not actually have pizza.

The drive was a long one. Rider had lived nearly as many places as Ana over the years, but when he said come over, he meant the Jakobson family homestead in Bakersfield. This meant a two-hour drive for Ana, ending at an iron gate with a silhouette of an eight-legged horse galloping along the top that was the mascot of the Valhalla Racing Stables. Sixteen Kentucky Derby champions had been born here, Rider liked to tell her, along with six Preakness Stakes winners, twelve Belmonts, and one—Forever in the Pink—who’d taken the Triple Crown. The many rooms of his sprawling ranch house contained hundreds of ribbons, dozens of trophies, a metric shit-ton of dried flowers still wrapped around their horseshoe forms, and photographs of four-legged victors going back eighty years, champions all. As far as the IRS was concerned, Valhalla still made a pretty penny breeding and boarding, but there were no horses on the gently sloping hills Ana drove through. Racing was fine and good family fun, as Rider liked to say, but there was no money in it. The only horses in his stables these days walked on two legs.

There were three other cars parked by the main house and one of them belonged to Malcolm, so Ana parked alongside them. Taking her bag of by-now cold burgers, she went on up the walk past beds of desert flowers, closed up for the night but still sweet-smelling, and knocked. Rider’s latest flavor answered, looking sullen. Ana didn’t know her name and didn’t bother to ask. Rider rarely kept them longer than a few weeks and this one was past her sell-by date.

Still, it didn’t hurt to be polite. “He in?” she asked, and for her pains received a chin-toss in the direction of the den.

Ana knew the way, but even if she didn’t, the earthy-sweet smell of some prime weed would have led her to the right room. There was no pizza on the round table that was the room’s dominant feature (on her first time seeing this, she’d asked if the table was meant to evoke Camelot and then had to explain that, as he’d never heard of the Round Table or Arthur’s intention that, without a head, all who sat were equal. “That’s fucking retarded,” had been Rider’s good-natured observation. “Wherever the fucking king sits, that’s the fucking head.”), but there were several cartons of Chinese take-out next to the porcelain bowl holding Rider’s peace offering, so Ana tossed her burgers into the mix for anyone who wanted them, assuming she herself didn’t take them after all. Indica made her crazy hungry.

“So,” she said, looking around at all the familiar faces—Rider, of course, Malcolm and Hal, Sykes and his two little friends. “Where do I sit?”

“Right there is fine,” said Rider, moving away from the wall where he’d been showing off horses half a century dead to his bored guests. He took a chair, nodding to the empty one across from what was now the head, then waved at the rest. “Gentlemen, rest your butts.”

Malcolm and Sykes came to a comical near-collision, shuffling around each other and glaring as they silently, politely fought to be the guy on the king’s right hand side. Malcolm won and, smirking, dropped himself on a chair. Sykes took the runner-up prize on Rider’s left and an eggroll. The rest of them arranged themselves according to their loyalties and waited.

Rider produced his pipe—a long-stemmed ivory number whose engravings resembled the Nordic shield-symbols he had tattooed on the side of his shaved head—and lit. He took two hits and passed it to the right, breathing smoke through a dragon’s smile and somehow making it last until everyone had had their turn. When the pipe came back to him, he took one more puff and set it in its holder, then got up and went to the built-in cabinet that hid his stereo system, among other things. 

“Music?” he called, already thumbing through his iPad. In seconds, the heavy drums and bizarre instruments of the Norse folk/death metal fusion he favored came blasting through the speakers. “Dig in, gentlemen. And lady,” he added with a nod toward Ana as he retook his throne. He put his boots up on the table, laced his fingers over his hard stomach and closed his eyes. “I got some Black Diamond there in the bowl. Smoke it if you want it. Relax. Take in the tunes. We’re all friends here. Good times. Good times.” 

The others eyed each other across the table. Malcolm reached for the pipe first, watching Rider as he lifted it out of its holder. When the dragon remained sleeping, Malcolm took a quick puff and put it back. 

“Pass that shit,” Rider said lazily, not opening his eyes. “Keep it rolling. Let’s get some love all up in here.”

Malcolm went for the pipe again and this time, passed it on to Hal.

Ana had a hit when it came her way and passed it on, then broke open a pair of chopsticks and helped herself to the carton of glass noodles. Her favorite. She wanted to enjoy it while she still could, as opposed to just shoveling it into her face.

Gradually, the tension in the room eased, but it would be an exaggeration to say it improved. The lines had been drawn around the table: the camp of Sykes to one side, the camp of cooks to the other, and Ana on the shit-side of both. They all smoked, but Ana was probably the only one enjoying it, content just to wait until Rider got to the fucking point, which he was in no hurry to do. As the thick skunky-sweet smoke filled the room, Rider remained motionless, meditating to the sound of screams and wooden flutes.

Ana was familiar with Rider’s playlists. She knew from the first track that this was his short one—only twenty minutes or so—just long enough for the weed to do its work. But apart from that first hit, he took none of it himself. He merely waited it out and when the iPad came to the end of its playlist and went silent, he put his feet back on the floor and opened his eyes. 

“Okay then,” he said, smiling around at all of them. “We all comfortable? Yes? No? Good.” He brought his hands together with a thunderous clap and rubbed them briskly. “Who wants to start?”

No one, it appeared.

“Ana,” said Rider.

“Present.”

“Sykes here says you laid hands on his boys.”

“That’s a lie,” said Ana, poking through the carton of stir-fry for a shrimp.

“The fuck it is, bitch!” Sykes exploded, leaping up.

In an instant, Rider was on his feet, towering over the other man by a good four inches and looking every inch the Viking god he liked to pretend to be. “Sit,” he said, very softly, “your ass down.”

Sykes sat.

After a long stare and a tense moment, so did Rider. He relit the pipe and started it on another trip around the table without taking a hit himself. “Ana?” 

“I used a hammer.”

“I see.”

“I laid hands on Malcolm, though. Like…four times? Five?” She shrugged, fishing out another shrimp. “I lost count.”

“And the reason for this was?”

“A situation arose. I chose to resolve it expeditiously rather than diplomatically.”

Rider nodded once and turned to Sykes. “And are you happy with the manner in which it was resolved?”

“No, I fucking well am not! Bitch hit me with a sucker shot while my back was turned and tried to carve my fucking eye out!”

“I doubt that,” said Rider. “You’ve still got two eyes. Ana?”

“Yup.”

“Did you try to carve this gentleman’s eye out?”

“Nope. Although I let him know the option was very much on the table, so I understand why he’d think so.”

“I see. Malcolm?”

Malcolm sat up a little straighter and pointed at Ana. “No one asked her fat ass to get involved in the first place! I was dealing with the situation just fine and she—”

“I’m sorry, whoa.” Rider held up a silencing hand, smiling in a puzzled way. “Fat ass? _Fat_ …ass?”

Malcolm’s brow furrowed and his pointing arm dropped. 

“Ana, stand up.”

Ana took a last bite of noodles and pushed the carton away, then stood up, chewing.

“Turn around, darlin’.”

She turned around, making one full revolution before facing the door.

“Not,” allowed Rider after a respectful pause, “the ass of a twelve-year old boy, but definitely not fat by any stretch of the imagination. That, gentlemen, is a fine, fine, _fine_ fucking ass. Corlisa! Hey, Corlisa! Come on in here!”

After a short wait, the den door opened and the girl who’d let Ana in the house stuck her head in. Rider waved her over to the table until she stood next to Ana, then said, “Turn around, sugar.”

Plainly puzzled, the girl obeyed.

“Now,” said Rider. “If you could only wear one ass as a hat for the rest of your life, which would it be? That bony excuse for a butt on the right—”

The girl’s jaw dropped and she spun around, color rising high and fast in her cheeks.

“—or that magnificent, luscious porn-star peach on the left?” Rider concluded reverently. 

“Fuck you!” the girl shrilled and slammed herself out again.

“The question stands,” Rider said.

Ana waited.

So did Rider.

“S’alright, I guess,” Sykes said finally and, one by one, the others grudgingly concurred.

“And don’t get me started on the tits,” said Rider. “Those Ds, darlin’?”

“Thirty-six C,” Ana replied.

“Thirty-six C,” he repeated, putting admiring emphasis on each syllable. “Well, they are marvelous. I want to have those tits bronzed so I can be buried with ‘em. Ana, darlin’, you can sit down. We thank you for your service.”

Ana sat and leaned across the table for the pot-stickers, smiling. 

“Now, gentlemen. I think we can all agree on two things. Firstly, that Ana’s ass is most definitely not fat. Yes?”

Yesses muttered all around.

“And secondly, that the owner of that highly desirable double-scoop of deliciousness was out of line with the way she handled today’s little dust-up and action must be taken. Yes?”

The yesses were more vigorous this time.

Ana had some chicken in black bean sauce and waited.

“After all, I’m running a business. And just like the racing business—like any business, really, but racing’s what I know,” he interrupted himself with a nod of apology. “Just like the racing business, it’s important for everyone involved to know their place. You got your grooms, you got your trainers, you got your jockeys, you got your book-keepers and your pursers and your agents, and dozens of people who all have to do their separate jobs in a co-operative manner, all of them working just as hard as they can for the greater good of a common goal. But you all don’t need to know any of that,” he finished, waving both hands in a never-mind manner, chuckling as he leaned over the table. “Because you all are just the horses. Your only job is to run. I put you on the track and you run. Right?”

The yesses went back to mumbles, accompanied by quasi-resentful, quasi-confused glances.

Ana dug into her bag and pulled out a cold burger.

“The only thing that should matter to you is how well you run for me, because the only horses that matter in my business are the ones who win me purses. And to that end, I need to know which horses are racers and which ones are just runners, which is to say, which ones I keep and which ones go to the yard and end up in cans of fucking dog food.” Rider looked at all of them, one after the other, giving each his full attention in their turn. When he had gone all the way around, he turned to his right and said, “Malcolm. Hal. Which one of you is the better cook?”

Malcolm was the first to recover from the apprehensive stillness that dropped over the two of them, raising his hand while Hal gaped at him.

Rider’s gun was in his hand in the next second (although Ana had to admit the Black Diamond had a habit of making time bend in funny ways and it was definitely starting to work on her) and pressed so hard against Hal’s head that his skin was dimpled in around the barrel. “Is that true?” he asked, leaning forward as Hal shrank back, pursuing his quarry until he had it pinned into the back of its chair. “Are you the runner? Mm? Are you? Boy, you better speak the fuck up, because if I don’t get an answer, I will shoot you dead.”

“No!”

“No, what? No, I won’t shoot you or no, you’re not the runner? Because I have to tell you, I don’t like being told what I will or won’t do in my own fucking house.”

“No, I’m not the runner!”

“You a racer?”

“I’m a racer!”

Rider shifted his gun from one to the other between one blink of Ana’s curious eyes and the next. “He says he’s the racer,” he said, faintly accusing, as if he’d been lied to.

“I am the racer,” said Malcolm, doing his best not to flinch and doing a pretty good job, too. “I am the winner. I am.”

“He is. Okay. Good to know. Hal, want you to go over to my closet and open it up. Inside,” he continued as Hal rose from his chair, “you will find a tarp. Kindly unfold it and lay it out on the floor over there.”

“Hey. Hey, listen. Wait, just wait.”

“Get,” said Rider, pointing his gun. “The tarp. Unfold it. Lay it out.”

Hal looked at Malcolm, who did not look back at him. White-faced, he moved to the closet. Plastic crinkled and paper rustled as he removed the tarp from its packaging. The tip of Rider’s gun twitched, tracking every movement as Hal noisily smoothed the tarp out over Rider’s carpet. When this was done, Hal turned and raised his hands. “Man,” he said, not very steadily. “Man, listen—”

“Now lie down.”

“Listen, just listen, okay?”

“Lie down. On. The floor.”

Shaking, Hal more collapsed than obeyed, but he lay down, folding his hands over the back of his head like he could turn this into an arrest if he went through the right motions. Rider waited until the other man was all the way down, then his arm moved and the gun was now right up in Sykes’s face, just brushing the tiny red mark where Ana’s screwdriver had scratched the thin skin under his eye. “And which one of you is the best dealer?”

All three of the men on that side of the table began to babble assurances, talking over one another, as quick to point out the others’ flaws as his own praises.

Rider listened for a while, then said, “Well, I can’t decide, so I guess seniority rules. Sykes, I known you six months. I don’t know these little shits you got with you at all. They’re your horses, not mine, and I don’t need them on my track. So, Sykes, tell your horses to go lie down.”

Sykes stared, mouth open, eyes wide.

“In about five seconds, you’re gonna lie down with them,” Rider said. “Four seconds. Three.”

“Lie down,” said Sykes. He licked his lips with a dry tongue. It made a papery sound. “Go lie down.”

Once they had obeyed—and it never failed to astonish Ana how they always obeyed. Never ran. Rarely argued. Just lay down—Rider sat back down in his throne and gave Malcolm and Sykes each a long look, now and then sucking air between his teeth. “Now here’s the rub,” he said at last, seemingly with real conflict. “No matter how many times they win on their home track, once you put two horses in the same race, only one of them can keep being the winner. So who is it? Is it you?” The gun pointed at Malcolm for a heartbeat, then at Sykes. “Or is it you?”

They both were. Racers and winners.

“Well, you both make a persuasive argument. Why don’t you both go have a little lie-down while I decide?” Rider indicated two empty spots on the tarp with the gun, then kicked his leg up on the table in the place Malcolm had vacated and had himself a smoke while he watched them settle.

For a long time, the only sounds were the slow sucking draws of Rider’s pipe and the tarp shuddering as one or more of his ponies softly cried.

“I just can’t decide,” Rider said at length. “But I kind of feel like I ought to shoot someone. I mean, here I am having a nice day, making money, catching up on my Game of Thrones, thinking I might head out to the desert tonight and do some drinking. My brother’s in town, you know. I don’t hardly see him, except at Christmas, and we haven’t been able to spend but two hours together this trip. Instead, I get both you miserable mewling bastards calling me up in tears because your widdle biddy feewings got hurt. I got to bring you over, I got to smooth it all out. I even bring out the good weed for you so we can all be friends, and what do you do? You shit all over my hospitality, at my table, in my house. So yeah. I’m definitely going to shoot someone tonight. The only thing left to decide is who it’s going to be. Now, you’re all going to run for me, I believe that. I can tell when a pony has learned his lesson and I do believe that when I put you all out on the track, you all are gonna _trot_ , yes, sir. Question is, which one of you—” On each of these final words, the gun moved, bouncing from target to target like it was following the bouncing ball on a singalong video. “—is least likely to win?” 

No one answered.

“Well. Between the five of you, that’s a tough call. But there is one person in this room who is most definitely not a winner.” Rider set his gun on the table before him, but kept his hand on it. He looked at Ana. “Do you know what a pace horse is?”

They did not, but all wanted very much to learn.

“In a racing stable, the bred favorite is taught his paces alongside another horse, but on a special rod that keeps him a little ahead of her. As they grow up, the rod comes off, but he’s used to being ahead of her, so as they’re trained to race, he’s actually trained to outrun her. The faster she goes, the faster he’s forced to go to keep outrunning her. Eventually, they’ll both be entered in a race, but the difference is, he’s the only racer.” Rider’s eyes, palest grey, gazed into Ana’s without blinking. “Not only is she not racing, but she will never _be_ a racer. Even if the racer drops dead right there on the track, right on the fucking ribbon, the pace horse doesn’t keep running and win the day while the crowd goes wild, she just stops. Because she’s not a racer. She’s not even a runner. She will never win one race on her own, not one. She’s only there to make some other horse run faster. Now.” He picked up his gun again, moved his finger to the trigger, and aimed it at the ceiling as he stared at Ana. “Have I got a pace horse in my house?”

“Yes,” said Ana.

“And who is that pace horse?”

“I am.”

Rider stood up. “And whose pace horse are you?”

She did not flinch. “Yours.”

The gun fired three times, paused, fired twice more.

Dead silence.

Slowly, Sykes raised his head and stared at the neat black hole smoking in the tarp in front of him. One by one, the others did the same.

“My pace horse handles her problems very, very fucking differently from me,” Rider said. “And if you don’t like the way she handles it, you better fucking say so now, because I have spent all the time on your silly horseshit I am ever gonna spend without burying it in the goddamned desert afterwards. Now. Questions? Comments? Disagreements?”

No one said anything.

“Get out of my house.”

Plastic crinkled and rubber soles squeaked as five men scrambled up. In seconds, the room was empty, but for the two of them. Outside, car doors slammed and engines roared.

“Fucking idiots.” Rider sat back down and put his boot back on the table. He picked up the nearest carton and some chopsticks and tucked in. “So,” he said around a mouthful of rice. “What the actual fuck went down at that house today?”

“Sykes was half an hour early to a pick-up and Malcolm got all I-am-the-one-who-knocks about it.”

“Loved that show. Made me feel like a rock star. Yeah, but no, I heard that part.” Rider leaned out to snag the burger bag and pull it to him. He unwrapped the remaining burger, put some hot mustard, kung pao chicken, stir fry veggies and fried rice on it, and slapped it together again. He took a bite, chewing with an expression of surprised contentment at the result of this experiment, then waved at her in his go-on manner. “I expect Malcolm to flip his shit over nothing. Not you. Something wrong, darlin’?”

Ana started to shake her head, then put out her hand.

Rider passed the pipe and waited while she re-lit it and took a hit. He took one for himself when she passed it back, then returned it to its holder and folded his hands, resting his bearded chin on his scarred knuckles. He waited.

The door cracked open. His girl peeked in.

“Bitch, roll on,” Rider said evenly, not so much as glancing her way. “We’re talking.”

Bang, went the door and the girl’s high-heeled footsteps rapidly receded down his hardwood hall. Both these things reminded Ana in a vague way of the bullet holes now decorating the floor of the den. She nodded that way, saying, “You want me to patch those up for you this weekend?”

“Can if you want. Having a little get-together Saturday afternoon with some associates of mine, but I don’t mind if you float around in the background. We’ll sit out by the pool, watch Corlisa squeeze her bony ass into that pink bikini she likes so much, maybe grill some steaks.”

“You don’t grill worth a shit, Rider.”

“Naw, but I know a guy and he grills like a fucking champ. And you can meet my brother. Or have you already met him? You know Ike?”

Ana shrugged like she was trying to throw off a probing hand. “I don’t know. I’ve met some of them. You’ve got a lot of family.”

“Got a lot of brothers, anyway,” Rider said with cat-like indifference. His decision to take over the family business had not been met with cheers of approval, let alone the direction in which he’d taken it, but being the dark horse was a role Rider was quite comfortable in. “You gonna get to the point, darlin’, or should I rustle up the photo box and pass out baby pictures? I was a cute baby, if I do say so myself.”

“Little skull-headed rattle, tattooed ass cheeks…”

“Riding a wolf pup,” he agreed. “Spill it, sugartits.”

Still she sat, her thoughts circling like smoke around those bullet holes, Rider’s faceless brother, that bedroom at the flip-house with sunlight slanting in the window and sawdust choking up the air, the old quarry back in Mammon, and, of all things, spiders. The kind that hid in holes and jumped out to grab their prey. All of it together, but spiders, most of all.

“You know about my cousin,” she said at last.

“You’ve mentioned him. The dead one.”

“Missing,” Ana corrected. “They never found him, so he’s just missing.”

Rider shrugged one burly shoulder. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

“Apparently, his mother is also missing. I got the phone call today. Like, right before all the shit went down. It may have been a factor. I maintain Malcolm was behaving like a little bitch, but I really over-reacted on all counts.” Ana glanced at the tarp and the neat line of blackened holes pocking it. One of them was smoking slightly, prompting her to reach for the pipe. “I thought you were going to make me apologize to them.”

“As if.” Rider had been a teenager in the 80s. Now and then, it came out. “Well, probably nothing’s going to come of it—nothing good, anyway—so don’t get your hopes up, but I can make some phone calls. When and where was she taken?”

“Mammon, Utah. Twelve years ago.”

“You spell that with one M or…” His brows furrowed. “Did you say _years_?”

“She had to be declared legally dead so the bank could sell her debts to the collection agency that is attempting to seize her house if I don’t pay them.”

“Oh, that is horseshit,” Rider said after a moment’s expressionless silence. He picked up his Chinese-ified burger and took another bite. “How much they looking for?”

“Thirty-eight thousand, he said, but there might be interest.”

Rider nodded. “You gonna pay it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I am. But it means…it means I need to deal with this, Rider. In person. And I could be gone awhile. The guy on the phone was pretty fucking evasive when it came to the condition of the house and, well, twelve years.” Ana eyed the pipe, wanting another hit but not enough to reach for it again so soon. “Roof is probably stove in or something.”

“Probably.”

“That was my aunt’s house,” she said to no one in particular. “That was my special place. My castle in the clouds. You know? Now it’s probably wrecked and I’ve got to pick it up.”

Rider passed the pipe.

She took a hit, breathed it out, and muttered, “And find her buried under it, most likely.”

“Most likely,” he agreed. “But that’s a good thing, ain’t it? Better you find her than the fucking bank. When you leaving?”

“As soon as the flip is done and ready to list.”

“Shit, don’t even, darlin’. If you need to go tonight, I can advance you fifty against your share and hire someone in to finish.”

She supposed she should have felt touched. Instead, in spite of the pot’s feel-good efforts, she bristled. “You know me better than that.”

“I do, indeed, but this is family, darlin’. You make exceptions.”

“I don’t leave a job half-done.”

“That don’t matter when it’s family.”

“It matters to me,” she said, and because she was a little buzzed and a little bitter, added, “I’ve had the job longer than I ever had a family.”

He gazed at her for a pot-stretched span of time and finally shrugged again, turning his attention back to his burger. “I ain’t going to throw you in the trunk of my car and drive you out there. Do what you want. Ain’t like they’re getting any deader for making ‘em wait, I guess.” He popped the last messy bite into his mouth and sucked hot mustard and peanut sauce off his fingers, casually adding, “Name of the fella squeezing you?”

Ana almost answered, but caught herself and smiled.

“I ain’t going to kill him,” Rider protested, now flicking through the carton of that bright pink pork the Chinese called barbeque for the perfect slice. “Just break a couple fingers, do a little cutting, maybe sodomize him with whatever happens to be lying around. It’s Utah, ain’t it? He’s probably religious. He’ll appreciate having a little of the fear of God put into him.”

“Thanks anyway. I’ll handle it.”

“By paying him,” Rider grunted, now eying the spring rolls. “That is not how you handle a shake-down, sugar. Tell you what. I’ll come along and have a look at the fine print on whatever papers they want you to sign.”

“You an expert in property law now?”

Rider shrugged, brushing crumbs of phylo and cabbage out of his beard. “I can find one for you.”

“I’m sure you could,” she agreed. “If I asked you for an ounce of uranium, two Easy Bake ovens and a live kangaroo, you could get that, too, but—”

“The new model ovens or the old ones?”

Ana stared at him for a second, unpinned, then laughed. “One of each. Whatever. My point is, I’ll handle this. I appreciate your concern, but I don’t need your help. I’m fine.”

“Yeah, yeah. Play it again, Sam.” Slapping both hands to the shaved sides of his head, he rubbed the frustration out of his tattoos, then flung his arms out wide in an expansive gesture of unconcern. “Look, you got to go, I’ll let you go. Shit, don’t I always?”

Ana had a few thoughts on his use of the word ‘let’, but elected not to express them at the moment. Rider had some good shit in that porcelain bowl and she wanted more of it tonight. “You do,” she said instead. “You always do.”

“And if you really feel you have got to go alone, I’ll let you do that too, as long as you understand you got options. You change your mind, you know you can always call me. We go back, Ana. Me and you, we’re practically family ourselves, ain’t we?” 

“You sure you want to be?” she asked. “Bad things happen to my family.”

“Mine, too. But only because I make ‘em happen,” he said, taking a carton of food in each huge hand and standing up from the table. “Ain’t nothing in the world badder than me. Now, we gonna watch some Game of Thrones or what? I need to relax and nothing does that better than a little sex and violence. Corlisa! Come clean this shit up.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING! This book contains strong adult themes, including adult language, drug and alcohol references, sexual themes, violence, and scenes of child abuse. This book should probably not be read by anyone. 
> 
> Bear with me, folks. Once I get Ana back in her hometown, we’ll see a lot more of Freddy & Friends, but they don’t make an appearance in this chapter. Hope you still enjoy it!
> 
> Five Nights At Freddy’s is the creation of Scott Cawthon. The characters of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Mangle, Toy Freddy, Toy Bonnie, Toy Chica, Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fredbear, Springtrap, Plushtrap, the Puppet, Balloon Boy, and the Purple Guy, as well as Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, belong to him. Everything else is a product of my own imagination and no similarity to actual events, locations, or people is intended or should be inferred. Do not reproduce, repost or copy any part of this story without my permission. 
> 
> As always, a sincere thank you to all those who took the time to rate and review if you liked it (or even if you didn’t like it). If you are interested in my non-fanfiction work, feel free to check out my blog at rleesmith.wordpress.com or look me up on Amazon.

# CHAPTER THREE

If asked, Ana would have been willing to swear on the Necronomicon that she did not allow the situation waiting for her in Mammon to influence her work habits, but the facts did not bear her out. Work on the house, which had followed the same broad schedule as every other house she had flipped for Rider, overnight became a nightmare and she had no one to blame but herself. Following Rider’s ‘pizza party’, she seldom saw the boys at all and whenever circumstances did throw them together, they were all on their very best behavior. Hal and Malcolm made a point of leaving the driveway open for her, and once, they even brought doughnuts.

Despite what should have been a relaxed and productive environment, Ana’s work suffered. Every night, she was forced to stay later and later in order to keep a schedule that had never been a problem before. And most mornings, she found herself redoing the previous night’s mistakes before she could even start, which inevitably led to her staying later. Once the cook was over and the boys were out, she moved herself in, in the hopes that having no escape from her responsibilities would force her to confront them. It was a tactic that had worked in the past, but although she was able to finish the house on time, the work itself was not up to her standards. Rider said it was fine and even paid her extra for what he called the custom details in the workshop, but Ana swallowed her pride and took it, even though she’d made a piss-miserable mess of those cabinets and they both knew it. 

She spent one night back at the duplex, cleaning and packing. The next morning, she rented a U-Haul trailer, loaded it and the truck with everything that would fit, put the rest out on the curb, brought the landlord over for her check-out walkthrough (he took one look at the stack of signed and dated photographs of their check-in walkthrough, and in his piggish eyes, Ana could see her security deposit flying on angel’s wings out of his pocket; he contested nothing, but he was not in a good mood), sat on the floor in the empty closet off the bedroom with her day pack on her lap and smoked a joint, then got up and left.

She drove only two hours that first day, straight to Rider’s house. He and she pissed the remains of the day away together, smoking way too much and watching horror movies that seemed to get sillier until they were both lying on the floor and hugging each other, tears of laughter streaming down their faces while severed heads went flying on his big-screen TV. Then Rider became convinced yet again that he could run across the swimming pool if he could just go fast enough, so they went out to give it a go, tossing in every inflatable what-the-fuck he had first, because physics were still a thing and Jesus Christ, he was not. Thor, maybe. Not the JC.

After she pulled him out of the pool, they lay together on the stones, looking at the stars while, in the house, his girl-for-now-but-not-too-much-longer-if-she-didn’t-calm-the-fuck-down slammed doors and flicked lights angrily on and off.

“You coming back?” Rider asked suddenly, when Ana was almost sleeping, her eyes open but insignificant.

“Don’t I always?”

“This feels different.”

“It always feels different,” said Ana, closing her eyes so she could see the stars better. “I always think this is the one and I always end up back in your stable.”

“You want out? I’ll let you out.”

“Never happen.” 

“Save that cradle-to-da-grave shit for Hollywood,” Rider said. “If I say I’ll let you out, I’ll let you right the fuck out. You’ve served your time. It ain’t like you’re gonna turn around and become a cop or some shit. You’d be happy with a little…like, a little coffee shop or something. Little glass counter with muffins and cookies and shit. Have, like, a couple racks of used books and some comfy chairs and couches, and play that alternative crap on the radio all day while kids sit around texting about social justice and checking each other’s privilege.”

Ana snickered. “Stoned-you is a closet hipster. I love it.”

“Fuck you,” Rider said comfortably. “I look great in a fucking fedora.”

“But it’ll never happen, Rider. I don’t mean you’ll never let it happen. I mean it never will.” She gave it some serious thought and said, “I think I was supposed to die when I was a kid.”

“Check that depressing shit now, darlin’. I’m at cruising altitude and I want to stay there.”

“No, I mean it. I think I was supposed to, like in that dumbshit movie we just saw. I think it was all planned out. In Mammon, I mean. Only I got away. Mom got me away. Of all people, right?” she interjected and snorted. “She tried to take it back later, but she couldn’t and that’s why my life is all fucked up. I was never supposed to live this long.”

“Horseshit.”

“No,” she insisted, warming to the idea now. “You know, it’s like those old myths you read about. There’s these three ladies who weave the universe and every single person’s life is one thread. They weave them all together, these ladies. One spins, one measures and one cuts. I was spun, you know? I was measured and woven in, and then I was supposed to be cut, but I wasn’t. My thread is just…just sticking out, getting more and more tangled up the longer it gets, because it doesn’t fit anywhere. I fucked up the universe, Rider. The whole universe. I should have died.”

“Never pegged you for a fatalist.”

“It’s all fatal,” she said, opening her eyes to see the stars staring down at her with their thousand, thousand blame-filled eyes. “Nobody gets out of this game alive. Right or wrong, guilty or innocent, young or old, everybody dies.”

“Not fatality, fatalism. You’re talking about Fate. Capital F. Like, predestination and shit.”

“I am?”

“You just said you were supposed to die. And because you didn’t, the grand tapestry of the universe got all snarled up. Right?”

“Right.”

“So that means you think there’s some big plan and it’s all already worked out. Every thread woven in, you said. Every life going back to the beginning and every life going on to the very end, all measured and cut according to its color, to make the picture the universe designed. This is what you believe?”

“I guess so?”

“Well, see, there’s a paradox in that, darlin’. If Fate exists and predestination is a thing, then everything that happens was meant to happen the way it happened. So if you’re alive, then by definition, you’re supposed to be alive, no matter how random it seems to your puny mortal eyes. Because it ain’t just your thread, even if it is all snarled up. Universe had to make your momma do what she did. Universe made you show up soaking wet in your socks on my doorstep. Universe made you come here tonight so you could move on tomorrow. There ain’t no holes in the tapestry,” he said, lifting one hand to point at the sky, where he surely saw the proof written out in runes only he could read. “Universe got you out of Mammon for a reason. Universe is sending you back.”

Ana propped herself up on her elbows, but getting that much closer didn’t show her anything new in the night sky. “You think so?”

“Me? Naw, I don’t believe in that stuff. This life is all there is and when we die, we rot in the ground. There ain’t no Fate and there ain’t no one watching to see how bad we fuck up or to care when we die. We are on a spinning rock running circles around a burning ball of gas, pulling us through space at millions of miles an hour. Them stars you think is guiding your life are just more pockets of nuclear fusion of decreasing stability in a vast vacuum, no more aware of you than you’re aware of the billions of microscopic bugs feeding on the shit in your intestines right now. Less aware, even, because them bugs are at least feeding on you and those stars don’t have dick to do with us or with each other. Hell, half of them have probably burned out by now and it’s just their ghost-lights we’re seeing. There could be a billion other planets out there with life on it, a billion other guys like you, looking up and wondering, but we’re all alone together in a universe that’s constantly expanding, just getting further and further and further apart. And you know what?”

“What?”

He turned his head on the poolside tiles and she turned hers, so that they were looking at each other from inches away, upside down, each of them whizzing through space at a million miles an hour, but still somehow able to touch.

“It’s all right,” he said.

Ana looked back at the stars for a minute or an hour and then sat up. There was more that came after that—a blur of color and sound and familiar pain, smoking a little and drinking way too much and eating plate after greasy plate of bacon-fries—but for the moment, she was sitting up and looking down, seeing stars above her and stars below, their light reflected in the pool, and feeling herself surrounded on every side by an infinite cosmos that neither knew nor cared she was there. “Let’s go,” she said, and those were the last words she would ever remember of all the rest of that night, until she woke the next morning.

She woke, not because it was morning and the sun was stabbing directly into her head through her ear-holes, and not because she was on the kitchen table using a loaf of bread for a pillow and Rider’s leather jacket for a blanket, but because she smelled coffee. 

Raising her head did two things: Firstly, it showed her Rider, wearing nothing but his boxers, leaning up against the counter and rubbing his face as he waited for the coffee to make enough of itself to pour into the cup he held. The second thing raising her head did was to pull the muscles across her upper back, releasing pain like a banner unfurling from a tower window.

Her throat locked up against the scream that wanted out; her mother had been dead fifteen years now, but that old habit would not wear down. Gritting her teeth, Ana sucked in a breath and tried to look behind her, shifting the weight of Rider’s jacket so that its collar pressed on her skin just below the nape of her neck and it was like the damn thing was made of knives.

“What the fuck?” Ana managed at last, but she knew. Oh, she knew.

Rider looked around at her, grunted, and took down another coffee cup. “Morning.”

“What did I do?” Ana moaned, rolling her legs off the edge of the table and dropping onto her feet. She came out of Rider’s jacket like a pistachio pulled from its shell, dry and dusty and a little green. She had no shirt on, just her bra. Her back from just under her neck to just over her shoulderblades was both burning and throbbing in a special way. New pain, but oh so familiar. “Why did you let me do it?”

“Let you, huh?” Rider tried to snort, coughed instead, and scratched his ass. “I ain’t the boss of you, apparently. I ain’t your daddy. I ain’t…whoever the fuck you said I wasn’t last night. Don’t remember. Point is, I ain’t him so I ain’t stopping you. You can do what you want and you wanted a tattoo.”

“What is it this time?” Ana asked, limping over to the shiny glass face of his double-oven and trying without success to get a good look. The glass was clean, but her reflection was distorted anyway, like trying to see herself in an oil-slick. She could only make out the pale blur of her back, monstrous and hunched, with a ribbon of bright pink arching from shoulder to shoulder, interrupted by spidery black lines. Just knowing what it was made the pain more tolerable, but amped up the irritation until it was as good as a headache. “God help you if you let me put angel wings on, you son of a…What is that?”

“You really don’t remember.” Shaking his head, Rider poured himself some coffee, then her, sliding the cup toward her like beer on a bar. “You ain’t gonna want to hear this, but I told you so.”

“I don’t want to hear that,” she snapped. “Is that words? Those are words! What does it say?” 

“Possibilities abound, don’t they? ‘More parking in the rear.’ ‘Pull my hair, bitch.’ ‘Don’t forget to sign the book.’” Rider sipped some coffee, watching her squint and contort in a futile effort to make sense of the calligraphy presenting itself backwards and dim in the surface of the oven’s door. “It says, ‘Everything is all right.’”

She stared at him. Her first thought, when she was capable of forming real thoughts again, was that she almost would have preferred, ‘Pull my hair.’ 

Footsteps in the hall—bare feet on the hardwood.

Ana lunged for the table, snatching up Rider’s jacket and yanking it on just as his girl came into the kitchen. She didn’t care if Rider saw her bare back—he’d seen it before—but his replaceable piece of tail didn’t need to know her business.

The other woman was dressed in the t-shirt Rider had been wearing last night, the message conveyed by its death’s head and bloodied daggers somewhat lessened by the sight of her pink panties winking in and out of view with every step. She stopped short when she saw Ana, her cat-eyed expression of sleepy greeting turning in an instant to wide-awake outrage. “Who the hell is this?”

“Friend of mine,” said Rider. “You met her yesterday, remember? Sugar, Ana? I don’t keep creamer, because I got a dick, but there’s milk.” Leaning into the fridge, he uncapped the jug and had a cautious sniff. “Maybe not. Rumchata okay? I got plenty of that.”

“I’m driving, Rider.”

“What the hell is she doing here?” the girl demanded, hands on hips.

“Slept over. Seriously, Ana, one drop in your coffee ain’t gonna kill you.”

“It’s called Rumchata for a reason, Rider. I don’t drink and drive.”

“Oh no, you do not stand there and ignore me! You did not bring your little whore-eyed ass-slut home and act like it don’t matter!”

Ana looked at Rider, conflicted.

“Go ahead,” he said, still investigating the refrigerator.

Ana looked back and gave the girl a smack to the mouth. Open-hand. Not too hard. She was a guest in his house, after all.

But the girl staggered back like she’d been shot, one hand covering her abused lips and the other pressed over her heart, eyes wide as saucers and full of disbelief. She sputtered a moment, then drew herself up and shrilled, “Are you going to let her get away with that?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You…! You…!”

“Bitch,” said Rider pleasantly, straightening and turning around to address her. “You do not tell me who I bring into my own house. If I want to fuck her right here in the sink in front of you, you still do not tell me who to fuck in my own house. You do not raise your voice to me in my own house over who I bring home. And last but not least, you do not insult my friends in my own house. Now get that bony ass over here and fry us up some eggs.”

The girl huffed and puffed, but didn’t throw a punch of her own and storm out. When her huffing and puffing failed to blow anything down, she walked, red-faced and tight-lipped, to the fridge and started making breakfast. 

Rider made room for her at the stove, then turned the full force of his most charming smile on Ana. “Come with me into the den, darlin’. I got a going-away present for you.”

Ana put her cup down, knowing damn well there’d be spit in it when she got back, but she wasn’t going to drink it black anyway. She followed him from the kitchen and down the hall, listening to his girl mutter at their backs when she thought they wouldn’t hear. Rider must have heard as well, but he didn’t comment. Probably didn’t think it was worth the breath to comment. Rider liked his women like he liked his food—the kind you take home and throw out when you’re done.

Ana’s day pack was waiting for her on the round table, but not alone. Beside it, still in its original box, was an old-school model Easy Bake oven.

Laughing hurt her back. She laughed anyway.

“Figured you were kidding about the uranium and the kangaroo,” said Rider, going to the cabinet. He brought out another Easy Bake oven, one of the new ones, and held it up. “Also wasn’t sure if you really wanted two of ‘em, but I thought it was best to come prepared.”

“Just the one’ll do me,” said Ana, grinning.

“Figured.” He put the second oven back in the cabinet and closed it up, then came over to the table and unzipped her day pack with a complete lack of self-consciousness. “Come on over, darlin’.”

She went, still smiling, but watchful as he opened the flaps on her pack and showed her its interior. Nestled among the spare set of clothes, non-perishable food, soap and shampoo and menstrual supplies, and all the other random crap she kept with her for those moments when she found herself away from home but still in need of stuff, were several new items. Pill bottles, the big ones, the kind vitamins came in, except that Ana didn’t take vitamins.

Rider opened one and held it out. It was roughly a third-full of little pink pills, with a puffy pink strawberry sticker on the top of the cap. “Lexotan,” he told her. “Six milligrams per. Stronger than you’re used to, but I figured you’d have some rough edges that needed sanding down while you’re out there. Not sure how long you’ll be gone, so I hooked you up with ninety. You take no more than one of them no more than once a day,” he added with a hard stare. “Got me?”

“Got you.”

He put that bottle away and brought out another, much smaller. Ginseng, it said, but it wasn’t. It had a puffy blueberry sticker on the cap. It was full of capsules, light on dark blue, unmarked. “Now, this is something new,” he said, shaking one out. “My Addy connection broke a couple weeks back, so I am temporarily without inflow. Got this instead. I’ve tried it and it gets the job done, but it ain’t quite the same thing, so do not be stupid around these things until you know how they’re gonna hit you. You got thirty of them.” He put the loner back in the bottle and put the bottle in her pack, knuckling through the others there in a dismissive way. “Vicodin, Xanax, Seconal, Oxy, Ritalin. Also, I know you didn’t like the Salvia you tried that one time, so I got you a little E and a little 2CB.”

“Holy shit, Rider.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know, but it’s the condom principle, ain’t it? Better to have it and not need it than need it and have to buy it from some shady bastard behind the library only to get arrested by an undercover cop in the middle of Mormon country. Homework,” he said, holding up a vitamin bottle marked with a puffy watermelon sticker. “I want you to try some of this. It’s a little bit of this and that, polished off with just a hint of DPT. Fella who gave it to me called it the White Light. I like it, but you tell me what you think.”

“Since when am I an expert?”

He shrugged. “Bottom’s dropping out of the meth market. Turns out people like having teeth and skin. Hallucinogens are the new in-thing and these all come with my personal guarantee. Try some. You’re going to see talking toasters and fuck a unicorn, but you won’t wake up naked under an overpass eating some homeless dude’s face.”

“Catchy.”

“Point is, I need an opinion from a source I can trust and neither the guy selling it nor the kids buying it are going to give me an honest answer when I ask if this is worth my investing. The fact that my girl might want to, I don’t know, feel good for one fucking night while she’s sweeping the ghosts out of the house she grew up in ain’t but icing on the cake.”

“Thanks, Rider,” said Ana, touched.

“No problem. Pot,” said Rider, all business once more. “You got a quarter-kilo of the usual here—” He lifted a large Ziploc bag full of weed and gave it a shake before putting it back. “—but for special occasions, you also got some Northern Lights,” he told her, opening a Costco-sized bottle marked aspirin, and shaking out a joint, already rolled. He took a sniff like it was the cork pulled from a bottle of fine wine and put it away again, only to take out a nearly identical bottle, this one marked extra-strength aspirin. “And some Black Diamonds laced with my finest blend of zombie dust. You remember that night we went out to the desert with Bowser and Tyrone and you said that whole place used to be underwater and you could prove it because the sky was full of whales?”

“No,” said Ana, raising an eyebrow.

Rider nodded. “Yeah, this would be why.” He put the joint back in the bottle. “Fly responsibly. Put your keys up, play some nice music, enjoy the trip. Do not mix with people unless you know them really, really well, because you are a lot of fun on this shit, but you lose all the sense of self-preservation you got, and darlin’, you ain’t got it to spare.”

He put the bottle in her pack and stood back, watching without embarrassment or even much interest as she took his place, pushing the many bottles within aside to get at the clothes underneath. She took his jacket off and put a shirt on, wincing just a little as the fabric scraped across her brand-new tattoo. When she zipped it up again and shouldered the canvas strap, he said, “This ain’t a gift, by the way. But we’ll settle up when you get back. You got enough money to pay these knee-breakers who got your mom’s house?”  
“My aunt’s house,” she corrected. “Yeah, I do.”

“All right. You’re making a huge mistake, but I’m gonna stand back and let you make it.”

“Thanks, Rider, I appreciate that.”

“I know you do. I know.” Picking up the Easy Bake oven, he preceded her out of the room and then out of the house. “You gonna come in and have some breakfast or you just gonna hit the road?”

“Hit the road.” Ana unlocked the truck for him and held on to the door while he put the oven in on the seat. She gave him her pack when he held out his hand for it and let him put that in, too. When he had nothing more to take, she lifted her chin, daring him to go in for a hug, or worse, a kiss.

He didn’t. He looked at her for a long time, there in his driveway with his woman staring at them through the living room window and when he spoke, his first words were: “This ain’t goodbye.” 

“No?”

“No. I said that enough to you to know how it feels. This ain’t goodbye. Not sure what it is, but it ain’t that. Call me when you get there.”

Ana rolled her eyes and started to shut the door.

He put out a hand to stop it mid-swing, giving her shoulder (and by extension, her tender back) a jolt. His eyes were flat and hard, his jaw set. “We known each other a long time,” he said quietly. A dangerous quiet. “I took you in when you had no one left in the whole wide world. I fed you. I kept you safe. You do me the goddamn courtesy of letting me know you at least got there alive. After that, I guess I ain’t got nothing to say, but you let me know that much.”

Ana frowned.

In the house, the girl paced out of sight to the kitchen and came back again, spatula in hand and raised like a sword.

“Fine,” said Ana. “I’ll send you a text or something when I get there. Jesus tap-dancing Christ! It’s not like you’ll never see me again.” 

He didn’t answer, just looked at her. After a few seconds, his expression unchanged, he shut the truck’s door. “Drive safe,” he said and went back into the house.

# * * *

The GPS in the truck said it was 576 miles from Rider’s house to the offices of Beltran and Blake in Salt Lake City and promised her she could be there in eight hours. The truck’s odometer told a different story at 642 miles and, between highway construction and city traffic, far from rolling into town at a quarter after four with time to spare before the office closed for the night, it was ten o’clock and full dark.

Ana found herself a hotel next to a Denny’s and got a room. She had a shower first, a burger third, a joint second and fourth, and slept like a stone until her wake-up call rang through the next morning at nine. Several cups of coffee and a French Slam later, she was pulling into the parking lot of the complex Beltran and Blake shared with six lawyers, a bondsman, two CPAs and a real estate office. The receptionist manning the front room took one look and pointed her to the bondsman. When Ana checked the directory for herself and set off down the hall, she heard him muttering into the phone for a security guard.

Really. And she’d brushed her hair and everything.

There wasn’t much going on in the tiny office, but it ground to an immediate halt when Ana pushed open the door and walked in—heavy workboots clumping on the carpet, keys jangling on the chain she kept clipped to her belt, her jeans distressed not by underpaid workers in some designer denim factory but by hard work and time, skull-faced Death reaping a harvest of souls on the front of her t-shirt, tattooed from her wrist to her shoulder, and her scuffed army surplus day pack under her arm. She couldn’t possibly be the most badass thing that had ever walked through that door, but she guessed the folks running the sort of office that bought other people’s debts and rooked them over got a little twitchy about appearances. 

The three men and one woman whose day she had interrupted all watched her choose a desk and when she sat down, one of them put down the coffee pot, took out his phone, and came a little closer. Not all the way. Just a little. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m Ana Stark,” said Ana, resisting the temptation to add, ‘And I’m here to kick your ass.’ Shit like that was only funny until the cops got called. “I’ve come to settle Marion Blaylock’s accounts.”

“Oh?” The man took another step, keeping the desk between them. “And how have you decided to do that?”

When Ana unzipped her day pack, everyone in the room took one step back. She pretended not to see, moving her clothes and other junk aside (her ‘vitamins’ had already been moved to the front flap compartment) to pull out her shoebox. She dropped it on the desk, knocked off the lid and said, “Cash okay?”

Cash was fine, but it took a long time to work their way through the legalese and sign all the papers. In as much as she had let herself expect anything, she had expected this to go pretty much like a rental agreement. Pick up some papers, sign her name a dozen times, shake hands and walk out. She had a hell of a long drive ahead of her if she was going to be in Mammon tonight. Maybe if she’d sat in on one of Rider’s acquisitions, she’d have been more prepared for the long slog that awaited her that day. A ream—not a stack or a file or a sheaf, but a fucking ream, as in, straight up the ass—of abatements, easements, encumbrances and assumptions, all needing initialing, dating, stamping and just so much signing. Some papers had to be read out loud before it could be signed. Others had to be copied and faxed and returned. Certain signatures had to be notarized. Every other line of every other paper had to be brought to her attention so that Beltran and Blake could not be held legally responsible if she failed to understand the full scope of the clause ‘as is’.

It. Took. Hours.

During one of the interminable stretches waiting for the bank to receive, approve and fax back some papers, Ana finally got a look at the property, in the form of digital photos on the debt guy’s phone (Yes, he had a name, and yes, she knew it, but she was never seeing this guy again after today and she saw no reason to get all first-name friendly with him). Her first impulse on seeing the pictures, stifled only by a lifetime of freezing up under intense emotion, was to leap up and punch this lying bastard in the face, because it was not her Aunt Easter’s house, not at all. Aunt Easter’s house had been big in relation to the dive where Ana and her mother had lived, but her aunt had worked at a pizza parlor, for crying out loud, there was no way she could have afforded a place like this. This was a mansion, something straight out of some old gothic ghost movie, with two chimneys like horns sprouting from the high mansard roofs and half-windows like eyes looking down from the attic. The exterior walls were sided in the same red rock that could be found all over the Utah deserts, but trimmed out in that unique gold-threaded black stone that had been mined to extinction in the quarry on which Mammon had been founded. The windows were leaded in Victorian patterns, all arches and diamonds. The columns spaced along the wraparound porch had Corinthian caps. She couldn’t see the door through the curtains of ivy that had overgrown much of the north face of the house, but it surely wouldn’t be just any old door.

And just like that, having not thought about Aunt Easter’s front door in years, the dark fog that overlaid so many of her childhood memories blew violently away and she remembered it: a pair of heavy dungeon-like doors, heavily carved all over, with matching iron latches in the middle. Not knobs, but latches, curving over and around and back under again. She could all but see her little hand following those elaborate lines with her fingers. 

Ana looked at the papers strewn over the surface of the desk, but the address was just a jumble of numbers without meaning. Had there been any other houses? Although she couldn’t be certain, she had the vague sense that there weren’t and the longer she thought about it, the more that sense solidified. There was nothing on Old Quarry Road but, well, the old quarry. The many winding lanes that cut into the mountainside might have had something to do with the mine once upon a time, reduced over a hundred years to mere bicycle or hiking trails. She could not recall ever coming across another person while exploring them with David, and certainly not another house. She thought she could remember riding in the backseat with David, going home after some night-time movie, seeing no lights at all in the dark woods that lined the twisting road until suddenly, there it was, the white globe lamp on the corner of the porch, shining through the trees like a second moon. Home.

She looked back at the phone and it was not that house. Then, as if the past and the present were two hands coming together in a painful, thunderous clap, it was.

“Are you all right?” the debt guy asked. 

Ana nodded, tapping through the pictures in silence. That sagging porch with the broken stair was the same place she and David used to eat their lunches on sunny days. Those straggling trees, choked with thornbushes and fallen branches, were the woods out back where she and David used to camp in the summertime. The roof where Aunt Easter used to hang lights every Christmas season had fallen gutters and missing shingles, but it was the same roof. The grass in the front yard had all died and the weeds sprung up in its place were all that propped the surviving pickets of the once-white fence upright. The windows were filthy, the curtains all drawn and closed; the house that had been her golden castle was dark now, and still.

“There’s no pictures of the inside,” she said when she reached the end.

“No,” the guy said after a noticeable pause. He was saved from having to say more by the fax machine and then it was back to the monotonous business of assuming the property, a process that numbed her to all other concerns so that she was actually on her way out of the office an hour later before she thought to ask again.

And again, he had to think about it and while he did, a short scene from a cheesy sci-fi comedy scrolled through Ana’s mind: _“What’s with the cat?” “Oh, the cat. Yeah, well, there’s a problem with the cat. Sign here.” “What’s the problem with the cat?” “It’s your problem.”_

“We couldn’t get a key,” was the lame-ass answer he decided on.

“Or a locksmith?”

“Not while there was any question about our legal right to possess the property.”

“But there’s no question of my right, is there?”

He seemed surprised, as well he should be, after four hours and a ream of signatures. “None at all. You have assumed full ownership and all the legal rights and responsibilities thereof. It is one hundred percent your property.”

“Then what’s the problem with the cat?” Ana asked bluntly. “With the house, I mean?”

He looked at her while the other people in this tiny office pretended to work and then he said, “Your aunt…let things go.”

“So you said and clearly, she did, but—”

“No, I’m not talking about what you can see. I mean on the inside. Listen, the first thing you’re going to have to do when you get to Mammon is find the Abstract Title office and talk to them, but odds are good, they’ll tell you you have ninety days to get the place up to code or vacate the property and let them condemn it. And having seen that house in person, I have to tell you, you’re better off vacating. If they’ll let you bulldoze the thing and start over from scratch, go for it, but don’t hold your breath. There’s a serious question of hazardous waste leakage already and demolition can only compound the problem. Either way, get ready to pay some hefty fines.”

“Didn’t I just take care of all that?”

“Oh no. No, you just paid the foreclosure settlement and assignment fees, which included the outstanding liens and damages the property had collected only up to the time of our office’s involvement. Since ownership of the property has been in a state of legal limbo, things like property taxes and other fees have continued to accrue—”

“So you’re telling me I just paid you forty-two thousand dollars for the privilege of buying debts I still have to pay?”

“No,” he said. “You paid the debts outstanding at the time of our acquisition and purchased the assignment of your aunt’s property. Now you have to assume the title and abstractions, which you must do at the Abstract Title office in Mammon, where you will have to pay the remaining taxes, liens and damages that have accrued since 2011. After you do that, they’ll let you know what your further financial responsibilities are. You might want to have a lawyer with you when you talk to them, because I think I can guarantee they’ll want the property vacated and the structure condemned.”

“You are making me really sorry I talked my friend out of breaking your arms and sodomizing you,” Ana remarked.

He blanched a little, but to his credit, he didn’t back down. “Ma’am, all of this information was in the packet you and I have just gone over in detail. Would you like me to show you your signature accepting assignment of liabilities?”

The temptation to stroll over and take one of his business cards out of the holder on his desk and tuck it away in her pocket was strong, but Ana overcame it. She’d never see this guy again. Best to save her badassery for the ones like him in Mammon.

“Look, now that our obligations are met, let me lay it on the line for you,” he was saying. “The zoning laws in that town are like nothing I have ever seen before. If you’ve got plans to chop up the property and throw down another dozen homes, forget it. If you’re thinking to turn the place into some sort of hotel or ranch, forget it. The lot cannot be rezoned or divided. It can only be used as single-family residence from now until the end of time, and even if you could do any of that, that place is one tumbleweed away from a ghost town. The best possible thing you can do for yourself financially is clean up that property and then sell it to the next sucker who comes along, because you are never going to get your money out of it in any significant way.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to share with me before I go?” she asked. “Is the back of the building burned off? Basement flooded? Tree through the kitchen wall? Shit, am I going to get down there and find squatters I got to evict?”

“No, nothing like that. I was amazed at how good the exterior was, considering how long it had been abandoned.” He hesitated, visibly weighing the pros and cons of saying his next words aloud before apparently coming to the same conclusion she did; he was never going to see her again. “Local rumor has it, the place is haunted.”

Ana stared, her frustration and anger fading into amusement against her will. “I remember there being monsters in the basement, but no ghosts.”

“I’m just telling you what I heard. And it’s obvious the teen set believes it, because there were only two broken windows and they both looked like storm damage to me. No graffiti, no fires, no trash. Just…the house itself.” His brows knit. “To tell you the truth, I was surprised how adamant the city seemed to be about condemning the structure. Don’t get me wrong—it needs a lot of work. If you decide to fix it up, if they even give you the option, there’s no way in the world you would ever see more equity than you invested in the repairs. But I’ve dealt with a lot of condemned properties in a lot of cities and usually, they will bend over backwards to work with you because they don’t want to do the clearing and cleaning either. These people…They don’t want to touch it, but they don’t want anyone else to touch it either.”

“Because it’s haunted, is that what you’re saying?” Ana snorted, too irritated to laugh. “I think I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not saying that at all,” he said. “But I have to tell you, I have been in dozens of houses that set the bar for bad investments. I’ve been in worse places as far as filth or neglect or damage or sheer perversity. Hell, I broke the lock on one foreclosure and walked in to find the previous owner hanging right in front of the door, six months dead, and he was neither the first nor the last corpse I’ve discovered. I’ve cleaned up bloodstains and puke and pentagrams. I don’t spook easy…but there was something really wrong about your aunt’s house. I never felt like I was alone there.”

Ana headed for the door, shaking her head.

He followed her, but only as far as the reception area. Sometime over the course of this long day, it had started raining, so he stayed in the doorway as she walked herself out to the truck. She thought he might have something else to say to her, so she lingered a few seconds longer than necessary after tossing her day pack up onto the seat, giving him a chance to call her back. He never did. He just watched and the longer he did it, the more it began to remind her of the way Rider had looked at her before she left, like he was taking a mental Last Seen Photo.

She was never going to see him again. It made no difference how he let her go. If he wanted to stare her down through the glass or wave her goodbye or grab his crotch and flick his tongue through his V’d fingers, it was all the same to Ana.

Damn it.

Ana stalked back across the parking lot and stood on the other side of the glass, daring him to open the door.

He started to, stopped, reached again, stopped again, and finally Ana grabbed the door and yanked it open herself.

“What?” she demanded. “Spit it out!”

“Look, I don’t believe in this stuff either,” he retorted. “But there are laws about disclosure and in accordance with those laws, I have to tell you, your aunt is not the first person to disappear in that house. It has a history.”

“Every house has a history.”

“Not like this. Look…” He glanced back at the receptionist, who had been joined in the interim by a security guard, and moved out under the overhang with Ana. “When you get to Mammon, make sure you ask for a Chain of Title. You should know what you’re getting into.”

“I do know,” Ana insisted. “I’ve been in that house before. I’ve _slept_ there. The only ghost in that goddamn house is mine.”

She turned and walked away through the rain. If he tried to wave her back again, she didn’t look for it. If he called out, she didn’t hear it. She climbed into the truck, slammed the door and peeled out without a backwards glance.

What time was it? Half-past three. Well, wasn’t that the icing on the hellcake? It was still a three-hour drive at the very least from Salt Lake to Mammon and that was assuming no traffic and no weather. No way was she going to make it.

What did that mean for her, exactly? She wouldn’t be able to pick up the title or the registration or whatever the fuck it was she needed tonight. Did that mean she couldn’t stay there tonight? If the house was being condemned, it might not be safe for her to go inside and she was all right with that for now, but was it even legal for her to pitch a tent in the yard? Assuming she could find the tent. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d slept in the cab of her pickup, but it sure wasn’t very comfortable. All things considered, she’d be better off just getting a room at a hotel, but the thought of paying money for a strange bed when the house she fucking well owned was mere miles away just rubbed her wrong.

Well, no point fuming over it. Ana found a hotel with unlocked wifi and used it to find the Abstract Title office in Mammon. She called. As briefly as possible, she told them who she was, but before she could get very far into explaining her concerns, the lady on the other end of the line said, “Please hold,” and blipped her off into dead space.

Ana shut off the truck’s engine and settled in for a wait.

Eleven long silent minutes later, the phone clicked and a different woman said, “Miss Blaylock?”

“Stark,” said Ana. “Marion Blaylock was my aunt.”

“I see. Are you in town?”

“Not yet, but I’m on my way. I hope to get there tonight, but I’m not going to make it before five, so I was wondering—”

“I’ll wait.”

“Uh, lady, I’m still in Salt Lake. The way things are going, it might be eight o’clock or even later before—”

“I’ll wait. Do you know the town at all?”

“I grew up there, but it was a long time ago.”

The woman uttered a low, somewhat uncomfortable laugh. “Nothing’s changed. Nothing ever does here. There’s a place called Gallifrey’s on the corner of Majestic and 12th St. It’s a diner. You know the place I mean?”

“Yeah, it’s in the same lot as the mall, right?” 

The words had popped right out of her mouth before she even remembered there was a mall in Mammon, but now there it was, as clear in her mind as if she were looking at it right now. She still couldn’t remember what it was called, but she could see the tall front windows hung with lights and all but smell the good mixed smells of pizza, burgers, cinnamon buns, hot pretzels and teriyaki chicken from the food court. A day’s window-shopping at the mall was a good day for little Ana and the feather in that cap was always a brisk walk across the parking lot for sundaes at Gallifrey’s, the three of them together—Ana and David and Aunt Easter—tucked into a corner booth and counting out quarters for the juke box…

“That’s the one,” the woman on the phone was saying as these thoughts dropped into the water of Ana’s mind like blood and swirled away down the drain. “I’ll wait at the office until six and if you don’t show, I’ll go to Gallifrey’s and wait for you there. I understand you’ve been on the road a long time, but our business shouldn’t take long.”

“That’s encouraging.”

“No,” said the woman with another of those laughs, even drier. “Please don’t be encouraged by anything you think I have to say. I’ll see you soon, Miss Blaylock.”

“Stark,” said Ana again, but she was already talking to the black.

# * * *

The rain came and went over the next three hours in mild waves that alternated between pissy sprinkles and windy, waterless fits, but the clouds to the south steadily darkened and she knew, no matter what it might be doing elsewhere in the state, in Mammon, it was raining. 

Over the years, whenever she had been pressed to mention where she’d grown up, after the usual jackassery about Mormons, someone would ask her how she’d liked living in the desert. It had always confused her. She did remember desert. At least, she remembered red rock canyons and great blasts of hardpan reaching out to the dark mountains on the horizon out past the quarry, but she also remembered rocky hills and towering trees, flurries of snow and torrential rains, the streets turned to rivers and the rivers to oceans. It was a wilderness that had dwarfed her memories of the town itself, so vast and so diverse that she had sometimes suspected she was remembering movie scenes and just superimposing herself and David onto them.

In high school, she would learn about microbiomes and how they formed and her odd memories would finally make a sort of sense. Mammon had been built in the rocky valley between the Salcombe Mountains and the Wasatch Range, with deep canyons breaking away north into the desert and climbing up into the forested hills to the south. Rain didn’t make it through the geographical gauntlet very often, but if it did, it sure didn’t leave until it had wrung out every last drop. The thunderstorms that followed the changing of the seasons were known to knock out power for days at a time and the snows could bury a car in a single night. 

And here it was, late February. The end of winter, the beginning of spring. She couldn’t have picked a worse time of year to come back, much less start an extensive renovation. The next time it started raining, it probably wouldn’t stop for a week.

Just as this thought passed through Ana’s mind, it started raining.

And it did not stop.

The clouds that had been following Ana south across the state thickened and blackened. Headlights came on, glittering like stars through the blinding rain, but it wasn’t until she passed Parowan and got off the highway onto the treacherous two-lane road that was the only way in or out of Mammon that the weather really hit. Wind buffeted the truck, forcing Ana to slow and slow and slow again, creeping along with one eye on the road ahead and the other on the trailer behind her as traffic screamed past her. The first sparks of lightning might have been her imagination, headlights refracting off the wet windshield, but soon it was unmistakable, forking across the whole sky and stinking up every breath with ozone. Between the thunder and the rain, it was impossible to turn the music up loud enough to hear it, so she shut it off and drove to the sound of slapping wipers and tires—a unique sound that brought back dark memories all their own.

By the time she came over the Mammon Canyon bridge, the narrow river she remembered sparkling at the bottom like a little blue ribbon was in full thrash and halfway up the escarpment. On the other side, the first in a string of signs she had utterly forgotten these twenty years seemed to spring up and slap her with its familiarity: _Mammon Welcomes You_ in gold script over an open scrapbook showing off scenes around town—sunset in the canyon, a mule deer nuzzling her speckled fawn, an exterior shot of the Historical Aircraft Museum, a child saluting the marchers in a Veteran’s Day parade…and the last picture, which had been blacked out, perhaps by the same artist who had then sprayed the looming figure of a teddy bear in a top hat, red in tooth and claw, with the tag line _Freddy Lives_ painted in dripping letters to look like blood. 

A few moments later, she was passing the second sign, the one with the word FOOD in giant balloony letters, surrounded by snapshots of all the dining choices to be found in town, from romantic hotspots to family friendly scenes, and over all of them, her wings outstretched to hug the whole town, was the painted figure of a yellow bird in a white bib, her eyes like sockets in a skull and her beak open to show rows and rows of jagged, bloody teeth. _Let’s Eat!_ said the uneven letters painted across the bird’s bib.

The third sign said FUN and captured the sort of generic entertainment to be had in any small town—children grinning up in wonder at fireworks, the obligatory fairground scene with teenaged girls posing with cotton candy fluffs as big as their heads, old men golfing, and a flock of fashionistas loaded down with shopping bags from the outlet mall that wasn’t even in Mammon, but in Hurricane, sixteen miles further east. Noticeably larger than the others and conspicuously centered was the frame for another snapshot, but it had been painted over and from this blackness grew the hunched and fanged image of a demonic rabbit, a severed arm in each hand, poised to bite the head off the little girl in the fireworks photo.

The last sign in the series depicted what someone must have considered the best from every venue—whitewater kayaking, the lighting of the Christmas tree in front of city hall, horseback riding in the canyon, flowers in bloom, kids playing in the park—and over all, the silhouette of an enormous hook-handed figure with pointed ears, long muzzle, and just so many teeth. _Come to play. Come to stay,_ said the sign. _Forever_ , the spray paint added.

The graffiti wasn’t new. She could remember seeing it, shivering at it, every time she and David biked back from the canyon. At the same time, the graffiti wasn’t old. At least, the paint wasn’t. It had been twenty years, but someone was still painting over the signs in the same way, maintaining the vandalism without improving on it with additional crudities or gore.

Ana mulled this over as she made her way downtown. The faithfulness with which Mammon’s delinquents continued their defacements struck her less as vandalism than as a labor of love. Spray paint was a kid’s weapon, and as rites of passage went, tagging up the welcome signs had an undeniable appeal, but she had trouble seeing kids keeping up the tradition with such relative restraint. The more she thought on it, the more she was reminded of that old movie trope—the old man leaving a single rose at the grave of his long-lost beloved twenty and thirty and forty years later.

But Freddy wasn’t dead. Freddy lives.

It was well past six o’clock by now, but Ana followed her GPS to the title office anyway, as much to re-acquaint herself with the town as to see if the woman had left yet. The windows were dark and the door was locked, but the side trip wasn’t wasted. Familiarity lay over every turn and intersection, more disorientating in its own way than a completely foreign town would have been. Some of the names on the buildings were different, but the streets themselves remained unchanged. There was the Pretty in Pink doll shop all the girls in school talked about and there, beside it, the model train and r/c car hobby store whose aisles little Ana used to wander with such longing. The video rental place had turned itself into a secondhand shop, but the bookstore was still stubbornly hanging on. The old two-screen movie theater was there, but although its marquee swore tickets were still available, the only posters hanging in the box office window were for Elizabeth Gaskell Elementary’s Third Grade production of Hansel and Gretel. 

And there, there was the school she used to go to, smaller than she remembered it, with newer playground equipment that nonetheless was well-weathered and in need of replacing. There was the bank and the streetlamp she used to stand under while she waited for David. And there was the street she used to live on, except…

It was gone. All gone. Not just her cul-de-sac, but the entire winding warren of them. Erased. In place of the small, shabby houses that used to be here was Primrose Park, with an expansive playground, a grassy lawn lined with beds of native flowers and shrubs, a jogging path sprinkled with benches to rest on or stationary stretching equipment for a little extra workout, even a pond where doubtless hungry ducks and geese begged for handouts on sunnier days than this one.

Ana drove into the parking lot and stared for some time, trying to find enough landmarks in the surrounding trees to determine where she used to live, but there was nothing left. Not of the neighborhood, not of the house, not of her. 

And time was ticking away.

Ana turned herself around again and drove to Gallifrey’s.

It was a small restaurant, squatting at the far end of the oceanic parking lot it shared with the mall, as well as a laundromat and appliance store she had failed to recall. The swooping 50s-style sign out front said, as it had done all the years of Ana’s mostly forgotten childhood, _GALLIFREY’S a classic “diner” with classic “food”_. As a child, she had found those quotation marks curious; now she found them quietly hilarious.

The few parking spaces adjoining the diner were not arranged with U-Haul trailers in mind, so she ended up parking over in the nosebleed section of the mall (appropriately named the Mammon Mall, she saw). The one box of clothes she could get at without unpacking the entire truck held some winter clothes and with a little effort, she was able to find a relatively plain hoodie, just the Bacardi bat and the message Get Some, nothing too demonic or suggestive. No sense freaking out the natives until after she’d worked out this whole title mess.

Splashing across the parking lot with the hood pulled low, Ana narrowly avoided getting run over by a nice Mormon family (“Bless you!” yelled Dad and they all laughed) and ducked into the diner. The smell of hot food and wet hair hit her immediately, followed by the facepunch of 50s nostalgia. Red and white check tiles, shiny chrome trimmings, and neon lights were everywhere, dotted by pennants and pictures of Elvis and muscle cars. The juke box was gone, although there was a picture of it beside the DVD rental box that had usurped its place. The wall behind the cashier’s station was a shrine, dedicated to the memories of founders Betty and Joe-Bob Gallifrey, whose family still ran the place, and over the counter, Ana could see one of them now—Tiny Tim Gallifrey, the hulking six-foot, three-hundred pound slab of man who cooked everything from hashbrowns and pancakes to chopsteak and gravy. And there was his wife, Lucy, a bit more heavyset than Ana recalled, slapping together a chocolate sundae with the same air of harried cheer Ana halfway remembered. The teenager rushing between the tables was unknown to her, but had the Gallifrey look about her. 

Ana scanned the tables as she shook off the worst of the weather and stopped when she reached a woman sitting alone at a corner booth—solidly built, modestly attired and middle-aged, typing away on a laptop with a sheaf of papers spread out before her. Ana had only the vaguest notion of what a person who worked in an Abstract Title office did, but she knew she was looking at one. When their eyes met, they both inclined their heads in ‘Are you waiting for me?’ nods.

The woman got up and came over as far as the podium. Up close, she aged another thirty years. “Miss Blaylock?”

“Stark,” said Ana, for the third fucking time. “I’m Ana Stark. My aunt is Marion Blaylock.”

“Right. Sorry. Well, I’m Wendy Rutter. You can call me…call me Mrs. Rutter. Please, come and sit.”

“You said over the phone this wouldn’t take long,” said Ana, sliding over the worn seat. “I sure hope you meant it, because this has been a hell of a long day. A heck, rather,” she amended with some consternation, spying the woman’s Choose the Right shield-shaped pin. Utah. Had to remember she was back in Utah. “A heck of a long day.”

The other woman picked up her papers and shuffled them around, then looked at Ana. Her lips—over-painted to give the impression she had them—pursed. She said, “First things first. What is it you intend to do with the property?”

“A lot depends on how I feel after I go there, but considering what I’ve had to pay out for it already, my intention as of this second is to fix it up and try to sell it.”

“You don’t intend to take over residence?”

“I intend to live there while I’m fixing it up, sure. But, and no offense or anything, but I don’t have a lot of good memories of this place. I never planned to come back and I can’t imagine staying one day longer than I have to.”

“It’s not a lifestyle that appeals to everyone,” Mrs. Rutter said, making it obvious through her non-committal tone that she very much took offense. “We’re a small community and quite close-knit. Strangers often have a difficult time adjusting.”

“I’m not exactly a stranger, you know. I was born here.”

“Yes, I’m aware. So.” Picking a few papers out of her stack and slipping them into a file folder with the words Mammon Abstract Title and Assignments printed on the front, the older woman asked, “What were you told about the condition of the property?”

“I was shown a couple pictures. Property itself looks a little rough, but it shouldn’t take too much sweat to get it under control. I’m told the house is a different story. Is this my notice to vacate pending condemnation?” she asked politely as she accepted the file folder she was passed.

“No,” Mrs. Rutter replied, just as politely. “By law, we’re required to give you ninety days before we can proceed in that direction.”

“But that is the direction you’re proceeding?”

“We intend to, yes.”

“Any particular reason beyond the obvious?”

“The obvious?”

“The condition of the house,” said Ana in her best, ‘You got a problem with me or my family, come out and say it,’ voice.

“The condition, the location.” The other woman shrugged with her hands and her eyebrows, then signaled the nearest server. “The history.”

“That’s twice today I’ve heard that word. Was there an axe murder in that house I’m somehow unaware of?”

“I don’t know anything about that. I only know that house is a bad place, Miss Blaylock, and it needs to be destroyed.”

“Stark,” said Ana. “Are you doing that deliberately or what? It’s Ana Stark.”

“I’m sorry. You just…” Mrs. Rutter’s professional veneer cracked a little around the eyes. “You look so much like her.”

Ana glanced at the window, as good as a mirror now that the sun was down. Her reflection was dark and colorless, but she didn’t need it to know she didn’t look a goddamn thing like Aunt Easter. Her aunt, like her mother, had been blonde with baby blue eyes, creamy skin, naturally rosy cheeks and lips—the works. And David had looked just like her, albeit with glasses and a jawline that promised to square out when he grew up…except he never had. 

Ana’s eyes were also blue, but not like her mother’s or Easter’s or even David’s. No soft sexy baby-blue eyes for Ana; they were instead a sharp, startling pale shade of what might generously be called sky blue and which Rider had more accurately dubbed ‘dog-eyes’ blue. Add to that the dark curse of her hair, which still would not lie flat no matter how many products she dumped on it or how viciously she beat it with a brush, and she could not have looked less like Aunt Easter, even without the muscles or the tattoos or the myriad other environmental factors that chipped away at a person’s genetic default settings.

“Did you even know her?” Ana asked, not in accusation, but just curious, because seriously, look so much like her?

The other woman laughed, a high, shrill sound that drew more than one frowning glance from other patrons of the diner. “Did I?” she asked and shook her head, still smiling. “I thought I did, once. I even thought we were friends, for a while. But she looked at me just the way you’re looking at me now when I tried to tell her to sell the house and let us just…just bury it. And you won’t either, will you?” She dropped her eyes, shook her head again, and started tapping her papers together and tucking them away. “I’d buy it from you myself if I could. I’d buy it from you just to burn it down.”

The server’s belated appearance stopped Ana before she could ask what the fuck that meant, and Mrs. Rutter took the check and got up from the booth.

“The city will be sending someone out in ninety days to inspect the property,” she said. “By which time, if it is deemed unsafe for human habitation, it will be condemned and you will be asked to vacate at your own cost. Included in that packet are the outstanding liens and other penalties associated with the property. Those need to be paid in full within thirty days. I’ve included information on your legal rights and the number of a local property lawyer if you’d like to retain counsel. I’ve also included my business number and the number of the city commissioner’s office if you have any further questions. I suppose I should say I’m very sorry for your loss, but your aunt fucked the devil himself and I hope she and her demonseed with her are both burning in hell.”

And with that final word, as dispassionately delivered as the rest of her speech, the other woman walked out and left Ana staring open-mouthed after her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING! This book contains strong adult themes, including adult language, drug and alcohol references, sexual themes, violence, and scenes of child abuse. Future episodes will contain graphic depictions of child abduction, violence towards children and adults, graphic gore violence and explicit sexual content. I am not kidding. This book should probably not be read by anyone. 
> 
> Five Nights At Freddy’s is the creation of Scott Cawthon. The characters of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Mangle, Toy Freddy, Toy Bonnie, Toy Chica, Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fredbear, Springtrap, Plushtrap, the Puppet, Balloon Boy, and the Purple Guy, as well as Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, belong to him. Everything else is a product of my own imagination and no similarity to actual events, locations, or people is intended or should be inferred. Do not reproduce, repost or copy any part of this story without my permission. 
> 
> As always, a sincere thank you to all those who took the time to rate and review if you liked it (or even if you didn’t like it). If you are interested in my non-fanfiction work, feel free to check out my blog at rleesmith.wordpress.com or look me up on Amazon.

# CHAPTER FOUR

Ana would have liked to be the sort of person who could storm out of a diner in a righteous fury after an insult like that, but it had been twelve hours since the last time she’d eaten and Mrs. Rutter was already gone. No one was there to watch her be indignant on her aunt’s behalf (or demonseed David), so Ana ordered a burger and ate damn near the whole thing, something she usually needed to be high to do. She thought about ordering a second one to take with her, reasoning she’d want something for breakfast and wouldn’t want to come back to town, but if the house was anywhere near as bad as she was braced for, she’d burn through the meager cleaning supplies she’d brought and be back to buy more anyway. Besides, an abandoned house likely had vermin of some kind (rats and roaches crawling through Aunt Easter’s walls…her heart ached), who would be happy to nibble on anything she brought with her into their territory.

So in the end, she left her last bite of burger, took nothing with her but another cup of coffee for the road, paid her check, and walked out to discover that what had started out as a typical spring storm had become a full-on Biblical event. The sun, low when she’d gone into Gallifrey’s, had set behind the storm and Mammon’s streetlamps illuminated only patches, but the lightning was coming fast and hard now, as if it wanted her to know just what she’d come back to.

Standing under the eaves, hunched against the wet slap of the wind, Ana could see white caps forming on the water in the road as it blew in waves against the curb, and then over it. Further down the street, the water was already up on the sidewalk, creeping out to fill the parking lot at the Little Critters pet store across the street, whose windows had been perhaps prophetically painted with grinning cartoon fish. Turning her head the other way, she could see a lake in front of the mall where her truck and trailer were now alone, tires half-lost to the tide.

She needed to get gone now.

The GPS came on when she started the truck, still trying to direct her to the title office, but Ana scarcely looked at it. She still knew the way to go: two blocks to Main Street and north until Main turned into Cawthon, which the locals had always called by its old name, Military Drive; four miles out of town, right where you’d miss it if you weren’t looking, hook a left onto Old Quarry Road and drive until you went up the mountain, through the woods and came to the long dirt lane with Aunt Easter’s house at the end.

She did not so much start driving as set sail, hearing water cut around the tires and feeling the drag of the trailer behind her like an anchor. There was a moment, looking left and right along Majestic before leaving Gallifrey’s behind her, that she spied the glowing sign for the Sugartree Motel and thought about just holing up for the night.

Right. Pay sixty bucks to sleep in, at best, the collected sweat and dandruff of a thousand passers-through when she was fifteen minutes from home. Aunt Easter’s home, anyway. Which was guaranteed to be in worse condition than the worst hotel Ana had ever stayed at in her life.

Sensibility be damned, Ana had come too far to turn back now, even for one night. She pulled out of Gallifrey’s into the river now running through the middle of town and aimed the bow for home.

Confidence kept her company on Main Street. Stubbornness prodded her out onto Cawthon, then bailed on her and let her drive alone with nothing but the rain slamming into her windshield and the howl of water rushing by on every side. She thought again of the Sugartree Motel and kept driving anyway, all the way out to the Old Quarry Road when the familiar landscape took a hard turn straight through a dark glass. 

Her foot stomped the brake without consulting the rest of her; the truck skidded, sluicing through two hundred feet and more of road-turned-river with the trailer fishtailing behind her, before she managed to find the traction to stop, inches from the rocky outcropping to the right of the turn she should be taking, the one that was so easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.

Ana wasn’t looking for it now. All her attention was fixed on the top of the outcrop, which she and David used to jokingly call Edge of Nowhere. It was the last hill and the last drop before coming into town or the first and easiest of all those they’d have to climb on the way to Aunt Easter’s. Its sides were steep, but it was flat at the top and if there weren’t any big kids up there sitting around and smoking and ready to pick on little kids, they would sit and look out past the quarry to the distant mountain range and imagine the world that lay beyond it. All the years of her childhood, that outcrop had boasted nothing but rocks and pines and an endless view of more of the same; now, black against the sheets of lightning that lit up the sky, there was a Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria.

It hadn’t been there when she’d left. Had it? But no, she was sure of it. Freddy’s was back on Circle Drive, smack in the middle of town where she and David had to bike right by the street it was on. There was another one on Mulholland, but all her memories of it were of a building like this one, long abandoned. Now that she thought about it, she could sort of recall cupping her hands around her eyes, trying to see through a wedge of dirty glass where some spray-painted boards had fallen away, but if she’d seen anything on the inside, she no longer remembered what it had been. It had been closed, if not literally all her life, long enough to make no difference. No, the only Freddy’s she’d ever known had been the one on Circle Drive. This one had to have been built after she left.

But it was closed now and had been for years. In the sporadic light of the storm, she could see the windows were boarded and the façade facing the highway had blown away, leaving only the F in Freddy’s with its distinctive top hat jauntily canted to one side and the RIA of Pizzeria on the other end with part of Chica’s waving wing, and nothing in the middle except the jut of rusted supports. She couldn’t see an access road from here, so it must be on the other side of the hill, but she didn’t need to get right up to it to know it was Freddy’s. 

Who would build a high-end gimmick restaurant here? _Here_ , at the corner of Cawthon and Old Quarry Road? Neither road connected with any other town or even any other county road. There were a few little dirt lanes branching off Old Quarry, but the road itself went nowhere but right to the source of the stink for which Mammon was known. Kids still went there, Ana was sure, but only until they got old enough to drive, at which time they did their partying out of town, away from the snakes and the smell. As for Cawthon, it cut arrow-straight across the desert to the site of the old military compound, but the base had been shut down something like fifty years ago. Whatever hadn’t been brought down or filled in before they’d left had been demolished on the city’s dime decades ago. Poking around for souvenirs was or at least had been a teenaged rite of passage, but the road was wrecked, the desert was harsh, and the best possible reward was a snake-infested ruin, covered over by graffiti and sand and stinking of the distant quarry and old piss. In all of Mammon, there was no worse place to build a restaurant and yet, here it was, _miles_ from anyone or anything, set down at the literal Edge of Nowhere and then abandoned. 

Freddy’s. 

She didn’t know how long she stared at it, hypnotized, but she didn’t snap out of it until she felt, with exquisite clarity, her back tires lift, then the front, and then she was floating gently sideways off the road. Ana slammed the truck into four-wheel drive and tapped the gas, turning the wheel into the current until her tires touched down again and she could find the traction to get moving. She aimed herself at Old Quarry Road where it climbed Edge of Nowhere, stealing glances up its steep side at the building crouched on top as if it would attack the second she gave it a clear shot. The trailer dragged behind her; she could feel it trying to tip, stabilizing only when she pulled it out of the road onto the hill.

It wasn’t a tall hill, just tall enough that she couldn’t see the nightmare waiting for her on the other side until she was on the top. There, she stopped and considered her options for some time as thunder rolled and the rain washed down.

There was no road at the bottom of the hill. None. A wall of water sluiced out through the pines on the left of where the road should be and after that, there was nothing but a frothy mess, a broad fall, and a muddy lake pouring endlessly away in the direction of the quarry.

She glanced in the side mirror, then rolled her window down and stuck her head out into the storm with her hand raised against the rain to get a better look at the highway behind her, but it, too, was underwater. Not as deep as the Quarry Road, but damn well deep enough and it was twice as far back to Mammon as it was to Aunt Easter’s at this point.

Ana stared for a while, the devil on her shoulder whispering that the road was there whether she could see it or not and it was only a few miles more to Aunt Easter’s, that this was the lowest point on the trip and once she got through it, she’d be back on high ground, that she could take it slow and easy and be just fine. The angel on her other shoulder just asked if she was fucking nuts.

Ana put her hand on the gear-shift, sat for a minute or two, then shook her head hard and put it in drive. Inches at a time, she eased her way down the hill, nosing into the current and immediately hooking a hard right, cranking the wheel and tapping the gas, hunting for and ultimately finding the access road she knew had to be there. She could feel the cracked asphalt breaking under her spinning tires. Cheap stuff. But the truck caught and pulled her free of the ominous drag of the water. The trailer came after, rocking dangerously even after it was out.

Ana headed for high ground, following the access road as it curved up, up and around the outer edge of the outcrop to the flat top, paradoxically bumpier now that it had been covered over in asphalt and then allowed to break apart. Nothing was left of the boulder that used to be her seat. Nothing was left of the charred ring of stones where big kids used to sometimes have fires. Nothing was here but Freddy’s.

Unlike every other place in town, grown smaller after twenty years’ absence, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria was so much bigger than the one she remembered on Circle Drive, just a ridiculous size for a restaurant. The parking lot was a cratered wasteland, seeming to stretch for miles before it touched the drop-link barricade that blocked off the doors. The emptiness, combined with the exaggerated scale of the building itself, made it look to Ana’s eyes like it had been designed to hold the entire population of Mammon and, according to the arrows painted on the ground, there was even more parking around back. The access road had brought her in on the south side of the building, right to the front doors and God knew there was plenty of room, but Ana circled around anyway, reasoning that she didn’t want to park where she could be seen from the road (the road which was under a foot of water now and where no one else but her was fool enough to go), looking at it all, unable to reconcile the monster squatting here with the nothing she remembered. 

Now that she was here, she could see that the southern face of the building, the one overlooking the highway, was in fact the windowed face of a massive indoor gymnasium, its tinted safety glass apparently thick enough that no one had bothered to board it over, and so layered in dirt that her headlights reflected off it no brighter than brick. Kids had been here, but hadn’t broken through anywhere she could see, settling instead for writing the usual aimless threats, declarations of love, and other witticisms— _Be Polite or Fuck Off, Designated Drug Area,_ and of course, _Freddy Lives_.

Behind the gym was an outdoor playground fenced in by chain-link panels, and although it had suffered considerable indignities over the years, it was still a damned sight more impressive than the one at the elementary school, with swings and monkey bars, a chipped and crumbling crawl-through sea monster, two spring-powered riding toys where a row of five had once been, the open grave that had once been a mighty sandbox, and the grand attraction: a pirate ship with a rusted slide, cloudy portholes, splintered hull, and rotted rope rigging climbing up to the crow’s nest and the corroded pole a child could have once slid down onto the deck. At one time, a plastic figure, probably Captain Fox himself, had stood watch over the playground, but it had been broken all the way down to its feet and all the pieces scattered or carried away. 

Ana followed the fence around the playground until it butted up against the rear of the building, then drove along the back lot, reading the graffiti and smiling at herself when she discovered, after working half her damn life shoulder to shoulder with the blue-collar and blue-talking set, she could still blush and all it took was seeing a spray-painted dick on a spray-painted Foxy. Just why that was so much more shocking than all the grindhouse-inspired slaughter accompanying it, she had no idea, but it was. 

She drove slowly, taking it all in (not the best choice of words, considering what Foxy was doing to Chica there), determined to be okay with everything she saw. And she was, for the most part. It helped that it wasn’t just the Fazbear Band frolicking up there in their X-rated way. At some point in the past twenty years, Mammon seemed to have acquired a substantial Furry community and they had all come here to play out a perpetual game of Pin the Dick/Tits on the Animatronic. But eventually, they’d run out of wall to draw on and Ana ran out of reasons to avoid parking. 

There was no reason to drive back around to the front of the building and, in fact, every reason not to, but she did. There was plenty of space in front of the doors, but traces of blue paint showed on the curb and old habits were strong. She wasn’t going to park in the handicapped slot and that was all there was to that. It wasn’t like she didn’t want to get any closer to the doors. They were locked anyway. What did she think, they’d spring open the second she got near them and drag her in? Did she think Freddy would be there, the way he’d been that day, waving at her from the stage? Did she think she’d see Aunt Easter in her work uniform, pretty and happy and young, her eyes flashing wide with surprise before she smiled and welcomed her in? Did she think she’d see David?

The thought hooked at her. The debt guy could talk all he wanted about ghosts in Aunt Easter’s house, but if David was anywhere, Ana knew he’d be haunting Freddy’s, waiting for her.

Ana sat in the truck, reading the graffiti splashed across the boards in front of her. When she ran out of graffiti, she read the signs posted by the entrance—No Trespassing, No Loitering, No Posting, as well as others assuring nervous parents that Freddy Fazbear’s was Smoke-Free, Drug-Free, Bully-Free and a designated emergency shelter for all conditions, probably up to and including the zombie apocalypse. When she ran out of signs, she watched the rain. 

Inevitably, she pulled her day pack over from the passenger seat and dug through it until she found her bag of weed. She took it out, but put it back without opening it, telling herself it was just too dark to try rolling her own joint and had nothing to do with the fact that her hands were shaking. If she was upset about anything at all, and she wasn’t, it was residual piss-off about that old bitch Rutter saying she hoped Aunt Easter and David were burning in hell. It had nothing to do with where she was parked for the night, waiting out the storm. This was just an empty building.

Ana felt around in her pack and brought out her cell phone and turned on the flashlight app so she could see the caps on her vitamin bottles. She found the Ecstasy first—E for eggplant, which was the puffy sticker Rider had put on the cap to help her tell it apart from all the others—and held it for a while, then put it back and kept looking until she found the strawberry-stickered Lexotan instead. She just wanted to calm down; she didn’t want to go flying. Not here.

She swallowed a little pink pill with the help of one of the bottles of water she always kept in her pack, then found the giant bottle marked aspirin—just the regular stuff, not the extra-strength—and shook out a joint. The flame of her lighter flickered as she chased down the tip. Windy night. She had the windows rolled up, but she guessed it was getting in through the vents. She was not upset. Her hands were not shaking. This was not Freddy’s. Maybe it had been once, but not for a long time and she and David had never even seen it built, so what did it matter? Hell, even if it was still in operation, it wouldn’t matter. She was a grown-ass woman, getting high in the parking lot just like any grown-ass woman had a right to do, and if those doors were open and those lights were on, she would walk right in and order a fucking pizza like any grown-ass woman would eat. And it would be all goopy cheese and tin-tasting sauce on a soggy cracker of a crust, because that was the kind of pizza kids liked to eat and she was a grown-ass woman now. She didn’t even like pizza all that much. She liked Chinese food.

Ana smoked and watched the rain hit her windshield. Now and then, her eyes moved through it to the boarded-up windows, but only because there was nothing else to look at. It was the same reason she kept looking at the doors, which were not only boarded over, but also shut up behind one of those drop-down link-chain barricades. Kids had broken the locking plate, so it was riding up on this end, but the boards were still in place.

Mostly.

A couple pieces had been pulled away from the Out door. Not many. Just enough to let her see that it wasn’t a heavy dungeon-door like the ones at Circle Drive, but a standard automatic sliding glass door. 

And it was open.

No more than three inches, five at most, but it was open.

Didn’t matter. Nothing in there. Just an empty building. More room to stretch her legs, maybe, but that was all.

Ana finished her joint. She started to shake out another, then capped the bottle and shoved it to the bottom of her pack, which she threw against the passenger door. “Let it soak in,” she muttered, gripping and twisting at the steering wheel as she stared at that black stripe of empty air between those open doors. “Just breathe deep and relax. You’re fine.”

She sat.

It rained.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she snarled, yanking back her seat belt. “Just go look around and get it the fuck out of your system! What are you afraid you’ll find?”

The rain hit her hard the instant she opened the truck’s door, pouring down spring-warm and as heavy as standing in a shower. Heavier, even. The water pressure back at the duplex was for shit. Pulling her hood down for all the protection it provided and aiming her phone’s light ahead of her, Ana splashed up onto the walkway and jogged over to the doors. 

She tried first to raise the barricade, but only the lowest rungs moved even a little. The rest stayed frozen in their tracks, rusted shut or clogged with dirt or both. Still, she could lift that bottom rung as high as her knees, which was enough to slide under if she could get the doors open. Which she couldn’t. Although she could work her hands into the opening, just pulling at them didn’t budge them in the least.

Backing off (but not giving up, not yet), Ana worked one arm into the opening and tried to shine her light around, but all she could see was a smallish space, like any foyer in any restaurant, with another Out door dead ahead of her, blocked off with an enormous pile of junk, and part of the wall with a few posters still stuck to it. The opening wasn’t wide enough to let her get a better angle and the barricade kept her from getting any closer. 

She had a prybar in her toolchest, but that was blocked off even better than that other door was. She might be able to reach it from the truck’s cab window, might even get the top drawer open, but there was nothing in there but screws and nails and bolts and shit of that sort. Her serious tools were in the bottom; they might as well be on the moon.

Ana hunkered down to stick an arm under the barricade and tug at the doors some more. Angle was wrong. No leverage. She shifted onto one knee, wedged her other foot between the doors, grabbed the opposite door in both hands and both kicked out and heaved back with all her strength. Her two-day-old tattoo protested, but her efforts were rewarded and the scraping shudders with which the old doors reluctantly prized apart made it easy to ignore something as insignificant as her body’s pain. 

The doors gave up another foot or so and not one more inch would they release. Between that and the barricade, she’d won herself an opening a little bigger than the average doggie door.

She’d gotten through tighter spaces before.

How bad did she want to see the inside of this place?

“Fuck it,” said Ana, getting on her knees. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

Hands and knees didn’t get her low enough. Ana dropped all the way to her belly, and as much as she thought she was braced against the immediate sluice of stormwater pouring down her shirt and up her pants legs, for a moment, she was right back on the seat of her mother’s car—not thinking about, right the fuck _there_ —with the water up to her chin and creeping higher and she, terrified, kicking and kicking at the window, feeling it break at last and all the river come pouring in, taking that last gulp of air before the river pulled it all out—

Ana squeezed her eyes shut, breathing in the grounding smells of wet concrete beneath her and the black reek of mildew and rot blowing out through the pizzeria’s open doors. She was not in the car. She was wet and she was high and that was all. She was fine.

With the added leverage of pushing from below, she got the gate to move another handspan up in its rusted track and then, with her back against one sliding door (her tattoo really did not like that) and both arms pushing straight out on the other, she managed to open it up enough to work her head and shoulders through. Releasing the barricade allowed it to drop its full weight on her, but although it was heavy, she could still move. She rolled onto her belly and up onto her elbows, breathing hard (and she could breathe just fine. There was plenty of air. She was not pinned, she was not trapped, she was not in the car), and shone her phone’s light around. 

The first thing—the very first thing—her light hit was a pair of bright green eyes staring back at her. Her heart lurched, then fell back into sheepish rhythm. Plastic eyes. Of course. Set in a plastic face, attached to a plastic body that had once been covered in white fuzz, but that had molded to a blotchy greyish-black. One of the animatronics, she thought at first…but which one? She knew them all and knew with surety this was not one.

It was a rooster, of the Foghorn Leghorn variety, so much so that Ana wouldn’t have been surprised if it was a copyright violation that got this place shut down. Big body, anthropomorphic wing-hands, full floppy coxcomb and wattle, grinning beak full of teeth. It had been positioned sitting on a plastic stump with plastic hay bales behind it, one knee kicked over the other in a casual manner, its stripped metal hand clutching the broken neck of a banjo while the other hovered eternally over absent strings. Across one of the hay bales, just at little-kid-eye-level, was a pitted plastic sign with the name BREWSTER ROOSTER.

But there was no Brewster Rooster at Freddy’s. She had never been in person, but through Aunt Easter’s tapes, she had visited the pizzeria a thousand times, ten thousand, and there had never been a rooster. Granted, that had been the pizzeria over on Circle Drive. Maybe the cast of characters changed from place to place?

Sensible. Logical. Yet oddly offensive.

The water spilling across the walkway was damming up against her side. She couldn’t lie here all night. She ought to go back to the truck, wait out the storm in the cab, change into the clothes she kept in her pack and just enjoy being dry for a goddamn change. Light up another joint. Breathe deep, as Rider would say. Relax.

Ana didn’t budge. Her light’s beam crawled over the animatronic’s features. Not even an animatronic, she decided, but just a statue, sort of. There were joints at the elbows and around its beak to indicate some kind of movement, but its left leg was molded to the stump it sat on and the right leg was molded to the left almost to its jointed knee. Clearly this thing never got up and moved around like the real animatronics. There was another sign, though. She could just make it out on the other side of the thing and it had a lot more writing on it than just a name. She had no reason to be here and every reason in the world to leave, but all reason aside, nothing in the world was as important in this moment as reading that sign.

She slithered through the sliding doors with the barricade pinching her to the ground the whole way, a tight fit lubricated by an inch and a half of muddy water, and promptly cut herself on a stray shard of glass. Swearing, she picked it out, then scanned the floor ahead of her and discovered a veritable minefield of glass under the camouflaging grime. Pulling her hoodie’s sleeve over her hand, she swept it aside and crawled in out of the worst of the weather, already twisting her entire body to see around the rooster without getting any closer to him.

_Meet Brewster!_ invited the second sign. _One of the new faces of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria! Brewster loves music and has always dreamed of playing in his favorite group, the Fazbear Band! He’s come all the way from the Rockin’ Barnyard to meet them, but this is his first time in the big city. Will you be his friend?_

“Jesus, Brewster,” Ana breathed. “How backwoods are you that Mammon is your idea of the big city?”

Brewster did not answer. 

New faces of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria…? _Freddy Fazbear_ was the face of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria! It didn’t need another face and even if it did, it had Chica’s and Bonnie’s and Foxy’s! Who the hell thought a plastic poser like Brewster could replace any of the real animatronics? He wasn’t even playing a real banjo. It was just a speaker shaped to look like one.

Did that mean…?

No. Even if it had been years since Ana had last seen one of Aunt Easter’s tapes and even if she had just been a little kid when she’d watched them, she had never been imaginative enough to just pretend she’d seen Freddy and the gang walking around the pizza parlor. They were real—well, real animatronics—and when they played in the band, they played real instruments. Okay, so Chica might be faking it on the keyboard, but it was still a real keyboard even if she was only twiddling her fingers above the keys while the demo tracks played, and Bonnie could slam out _She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain_ like a rock star.

But it was such a long time ago. Had she ever seen Bonnie play the guitar or had she just seen some robot strumming on a guitar-shaped speaker just like Brewster’s crappy banjo, and let David convince her he could play? Had there even been animatronics at all? Maybe they were just people in suits.

She shouldn’t be here. She should leave now, before she saw anything else. Memories were such fragile things and she didn’t have so many good ones that she could afford to shatter them now.

But she was here. She was finally here. How could she leave until she’d seen it all?

Ana took her light off Brewster and looked around the rest of the entryway. Standing here in front of the exit door, she could peer through the pane of glass at her left into the dark hall that ran up the length of the building, but the layers of grime that caked the glass made it impossible to see very far. Neither could she barge rebelliously through the Out door ahead of her and check out the hall on foot: a tangle of broken tables and chairs and other random chunks of metal, plastic and wooden debris had been wedged together in a massive barricade, blocking off the Out door from wall to wall and at least five feet deep. On the other side of the foyer, where the entrance to the pizzeria didn’t even have a door to help contain it, the mess was even worse, completely filling the U-shaped queue that wound back and forth in front of the cashier’s station. The only clear space was the spot right here where Ana stood. And to judge by the scratches and cracks in ol’ Brewster’s fake plastic body, the area hadn’t always been cleared. At some point in the past, this entire foyer had been hip deep in junk.

The more she studied this tangle, the odder it seemed. It wasn’t the sort of thing someone would do as part of locking up the restaurant and it was equally out of character for vandals. There was something so deliberate about it all. If someone had just thrown shit in a heap, it would have more of a sprawling look. Instead, someone had built this blockade, brick by brick so to speak, wedging each piece into place before applying the next one. In fact, the longer she studied it, the more obvious it became that whoever the builders had been, they must have started at the Out door, which had the tallest and densest barricade structure, and worked their way around the U-shaped foyer, then past the cashier’s station, where their building materials petered out. 

There, at what was arguably the weakest spot, the barricade was shot through with jagged metal and broken lumber sticking straight out like spears, angled so any future trespasser attempting to climb it was one loose handhold away from a sharpened chair leg through the throat, belly and/or balls. They’d been serious about it, in other words. But someone had gotten in despite it, Ana saw, and the proof was more than just the little clearing in which she stood. 

Behind Brewster, the foyer wall was covered in posters and newspaper clippings, and lots and lots of photos of little kids enjoying the shit out of their day at Freddy’s, but the area on this side of the wall had a display window built into it that opened on the gift shop, because capitalism is king and what better way to stand in line than to do it with a bunch of kids whining for a Foxy plushie or a Freddy hat? What hadn’t been scavenged out of the gift shop had just been thrown around and left to rot, but it wasn’t the stuff Ana was looking at. The window showing it all off had been broken out—the source of all the glass on the floor—and there was a countertop right on the other side. She could get in that way. If she wanted to get in. Which she didn’t need to do.

It was funny, though. The way the window was broken made it look like someone had broken out, not in.

Ana kicked at the glass scattered over the floor, stirring up eddies of stormwater and the dirty white corner of something else, invisible under the sediment of who knew how many years. When she tried to pick it up, she pulled easily six feet of banner out of the water, although most of it was buried under the heap of crap at the other end of the foyer. Grand O, it said.

Ana let the banner drop again and stood for too long, watching it float on the surface of the water that was still seeping in from outside. She didn’t know why it should seem so much more sinister that the restaurant had closed so soon after its opening that the celebratory banner had still been hanging in the foyer, but it was. She didn’t like looking at it, so she looked at the wall instead.

Among the photos, drawings and newspaper clippings were posters, glamor-shots of each of the animatronics. There were no names, but that was all right. Ana didn’t need them for the real animatronics and didn’t care who the fake ones were. Freddy and his friends didn’t look quite the way she remembered from the tapes she’d watched as a kid, but weirdly, it wasn’t because her grown-up eyes now saw them as fake. If anything, they looked _more_ like them, if that made any sense, which only made the new ones look even phonier. 

And there at the top, as was his due, Freddy himself, impeccably dressed in silk top hat and black bowtie. He was made of circles—a round face with little round ears on either side of his hat, big round unbearishly blue eyes, a small round black nose at the blunt tip of his fat round muzzle, full of blunt, white, kid-friendly teeth. If this new version were anything like his previous incarnation, he would also be round in the belly, yet broad through the shoulders—a teddy rather than a grizzly, maybe, but still a bear. He had his signature microphone in his hand and his mouth open, either singing or chatting up the crowd or maybe just showing off his smile, and through some trick of the camera, he seemed to be looking right at her. _Come on in_ , he seemed to be saying. _You finally made it. You’re finally here. Come on in and sit down. Let me tell you a story and sing you a song. Have some pizza. Have a drink. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, kids. Come on in and welcome to Freddy’s._

The pot must have been working, because she lost track of the time, studying that picture as if it hung in a museum and not on this mildewing, waterstained wall, and when she moved on, it was only as far as the other animatronics she remembered from Aunt Easter’s tapes and David’s many stories. 

First, Bonnie the Bunny, who was single-handedly responsible for that annoying flutter of confusion that followed Ana through life when she found out the entire rest of the world seemed to think Bonnie was a _girl’s_ name. He was in three-quarters profile, one long ear straight up and the other crooked as a wink, giving the camera the kind of smirking sidelong stare that suggested he could see down the front of her shirt from his vantage up there. The neck of his guitar was visible on the poster and his three thick fingers were posed over the strings as if he were not only ready but anxious to get playing. 

Under him, Chica, a bright blue ribbon tied around the three plastic feathers on top of her yellow head, her orange beak open to display her pearly white teeth to their best advantage. She was holding up a birthday cake whose sprinkle-dusted frosting mirrored her confetti-printed bib; both said _Let’s Eat!_ in rainbow letters. 

Below Chica was Captain Fox of the good ship _The Flying Fox,_ forever moored in Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. His long, thin muzzle was open to show each pointed tooth and he was using his hook-hand to pull the brim of his plumed pirate hat low over his eyepatch so that he looked just as fearsome and piratey as possible. And beside Foxy was a stranger—a white wolf or maybe even another fox, obviously female, with lipstick ridiculously applied to the very tip of her muzzle. One eye had been heavily made up with purple shadow; the other was covered with a pink eyepatch.

And of course, there were five more new faces on four other posters: Brewster the rooster, an alligator or crocodile or possibly a dinosaur, a black cat, a freckled pig in long looped braids, and two nearly identical rodent-looking things sharing one poster whose headshots made it impossible to determine their exact species, and frankly, Ana found it difficult to care. They were, every one of them, plastic, inert and just plain dumb. Of them all, only the lipsticked piratess next to Foxy looked real, although the longer Ana stared into her single long-lashed eye, the more uneasy she felt. 

Of the hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings that filled the space between the posters, creeping mold had blackened some and time washed out others, but a few images remained and Ana paid them her respects as well. They certainly went back, some of them all the way to black-and-white dads in hats and moms in Stepford dresses. So many happy kids. She looked at them—eating pizza, blowing out candles, posing with Freddy, hugging Chica, rocking out with Bonnie, swordfighting with Foxy…a wall full of the best days ever. And there, right in the middle—

Her heart stopped again. This time, it broke.

Here he was and hadn’t she just been thinking she’d find him here? How could he not be? He’d all but lived at Freddy’s. They were his friends. They were his second family.

David. He was wearing a paper Freddy-mask that only showed the lower half of his face, but it was David. She knew that haircut, knew that Captain America t-shirt, knew that wicked gap-toothed grin. Aunt Easter was there with him in her work uniform, her arm around his thin shoulders the way Ana’s own mother had never hugged her, and she was laughing with him at whatever wonderful thing was happening out of frame. David. It was almost like he was alive.

Almost.

She reached with one hand to take the photo down, but didn’t. She had no pictures of David, no proof apart from her own unreliable memories that he had ever existed, but this wasn’t hers. She wouldn’t steal it. She was in Freddy’s house at last; she wouldn’t rob him.

But if ever there was a moment when she might have just turned around and left, it ended there. Now she had to see it. She had to see it all.

Ana hupped herself through the gift shop window and climbed down from the countertop onto a layer of moldy shirts. Picking her way across a sea of broken and decayed toys, one hand covering her mouth and nose as a laughable defense against the stink she released with every step, she made her way out and into the dining room.

This was it. Freddy Fazbear’s. The place was in a sorry state, even considering how long it must have been shut down. The roof was going, clearly. She could hear the wet smack of water dropping into puddles and see the shine of the pervading damp anywhere she turned her light. There wasn’t much to see. At one time, this room had been filled with long tables and chairs, but most had been crammed into the foyer. Now only three remained, shoved out of alignment across the middle of an empty floor. Black mold grew on the ceiling and white mold bloomed like flowers on the walls. The smell of time gone to rot was everywhere, but it was Freddy’s and yes, it felt like coming home.

How long Ana stood there in the corner of the dining room, just drinking that fetid/welcoming sight in, she didn’t know, but at last she pushed nostalgia aside and got her bearings. The gift shop was to her right; the exit door and its blockade, behind her; to her left, a swinging door that reluctantly opened on a hall that ran the length of the building, all boarded windows on one side and closed doors spotting the other, and at its very end—

What was that? 

She blinked and looked again, shining her tiny light for all it was worth and trying to listen past the drumming of rain on boards. She had not seen movement, she decided. She had not heard footsteps. There was another of those fake animatronics at the end of the hall and it had been a trick of the moving flashlight and swooping shadows that made her think she’d seen something else duck away.

All the same, she did not head down the hall to prove herself right. When she started walking, it was deeper into the dining room.

It was very different from the one at Circle Drive, even if she had only known it second-hand. There was no arcade and no Pirate’s Cove, just a big brick of a room. The stage on the east end was its dominant feature—a half-circle pushing out from an angular tri-jointed wall—and of course, it was empty. At one time, there had been a curtain, but someone had torn it down and now it soaked up rain and sprouted unwholesome-looking fungi on the floor. The backdrops she remembered from Aunt Easter’s tapes—smiling sun, puffy clouds, crescent moon and twinkling stars—were either stuck to the wall by years of damp and dirt, or had rotted into shreds on the floor. Colored stagelights had been smashed and the glass left to litter the ground. Bonnie’s guitar was leaned up against the corner in his end of the stage, stringless, with cracks in the body and chips in the paint, but Bonnie himself was nowhere to be seen. Freddy’s microphone stand lay on the floor before the stage, but Freddy was gone. There was no sign at all of Chica’s keyboard, or of Chica herself. The show was over; the players were long gone, probably rusting out in some scrapyard or collecting dust in someone’s basement or wherever it was old animatronics went to die, and this was just what she’d expected to see, so why was her heart breaking? Why was she still moving forward, still looking around? What did she think she was going to find?

Past the stage, in the northwest corner, was a dark opening, the mouth of a hall, leading deeper into the pizzeria and just begging to be explored. The north wall was featureless apart from old posters and blooms of mold, but there were two swinging doors hung in the middle. Rather, there had been two swinging doors. Now there was one door, no longer swinging but not quite closed, and another door, thrown out twenty feet or so into the middle of the dining room. 

Moved out, Ana corrected herself, but she didn’t believe it. Even from here, she could see the twisted points of the hinges and the craters in the jamb where they’d been torn out. Someone had ripped that thing off like a wing off a fly. Someone had thrown it. And not even at the obvious target, she thought, now shining her light into the northeast corner, where there was a small tray return window, a couple upended trashcans, and another fake animatronic. It was the alligator, definitely an alligator now that she could see the whole model, pot-bellied and long-bodied, with plastic textured to look like a straw hat molded to his head and a red plastic bandana molded to its neck. He was even holding a giant plastic jug with three honest-to-God X’s on the side. Someone had torn his eyes out—or blown them out with firecrackers, to judge by the blackened spiderweb of cracks and smoke burns radiating out of the sockets—but the rest of him was surprisingly intact. It looked like his head could turn and his arm could move enough to either let him have a swig from his moonshine jug or maybe blow on it (or pretend to blow, rather, since the jug was as fake as the animatronic), but otherwise, he was fixed in place and immobile. SWAMPY GATOR said his name-plaque. _You can find this good ol’ boy in the Bayou,_ his informative sign added, _playing with the Backwater Band, but he just loves jamming with his big city friends!_

Honestly, Ana could not imagine having a door in her hands and not flinging it straight at that damn thing.

But even as this thought flitted through her brain, she had to ask herself why? What made these things—Brewster and whats-his-redneck-butt Gator so offensive to her eye, but Freddy and the rest so sacred? What was the difference?

She didn’t know, but there was one.

She was being silly.

No, she really wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but it was true. There was a difference. If Freddy and the rest were here and she could do a side-by-side, she might even be able to pinpoint just what that difference was, but on the other hand, it was a good thing they weren’t. Because it would be awful to see them now, here, left to rot in this horrible mess.

Never mind, plenty else to see. Against the southern side of the room were a few booths where parents uninterested in the adventures of the Fazbear Band could sit in relative seclusion but still watch over their kids. On the other side of the booths, Ana could glimpse the tip of the junk pile blocking off the cashier’s station and the foyer beyond. The western end of the dining room opened on a wide hall, with the bathrooms situated at the center. A cartoony picture of Chica was holding up a sign on one that said Girls while Brewster represented the Boys. Above them, obscuring Brewster’s stupid face, hung a helpful double-headed arrow that had snapped all but one wire. At one time, it would have directed her to the gymnasium or playground; now it could only show her the distance between heaven and hell. And set in the wall between the bathroom doors was a shadow box of some sort with what looked from here like…shrunken heads? 

Ana moved closer and closer still, then gave up and went all the way over, leaving the safety of the gift shop and its promise of a quick escape to discover, not shrunken heads, but a trio of white mice dressed up like Old West dancing girls, caught mid-can-can and frozen forever. When Ana tapped the glass, they all dropped their left leg a hair, but that was all. She guessed when this place had been open, they danced. Above this defunct display was a cleaner squarish space, so Ana looked around for the fallen sign and found it facedown and blacked over with grime. She wiped it off on her thigh, which was plenty wet enough to use as a wash-towel, and read _Millie, Tillie and Hillie at Miss Kitty’s Sarsaparilla Saloon! Visit Gallup Gulch!_

Gallup Gulch? Was that like Pirate Cove? Ana looked back into the dining room, but couldn’t even see a separate stage for Captain Fox, much less another one dressed up like a saloon. Come to think of it, what about Swampy and the ‘bayou’ he supposedly hailed from? What about Brewster’s barnyard? The building was huge for a restaurant and the dining room was only a piece of it, but there couldn’t be room enough for all these places. 

A roll of thunder made her start enough to drop both the sign and her phone. She recovered the latter, left the former, and shone her light up and down the hall, but the doors at each end had been blocked off with more tables and chairs and racks and what looked like pizza trays and pieces of industrial steel shelving. It could all be moved, she supposed. None of it looked very heavy or very sturdy, but why bother? Did she want to go back out in the pouring rain just to look at the playground some more? Or worse, bust her way into the gym and find out what kid-pee smelled like when it had baked in the Utah heat and then got wet under a leaky roof for a few years?

Ana turned around and damned if her light’s beam didn’t do that swoopy-shadow-trick again, this time over by the kitchen door.

Which was moving, just a little, as if someone had brushed it as they’d gone by. Even as she watched, its small swaying slowed and stopped.

There was a draft, she told herself, and there was. Plenty of wind was getting past the boards that covered over these broken windows. There was a draft, for real. She could feel it raising the chillflesh on her arms even now.

She thought of her truck and especially of the knives she kept in the toolbox and the glovebox and under the driver’s seat. Then she went over to the kitchen doors, cell phone firmly in hand, and peeped in.

A kitchen. Just a kitchen. All stainless steel surfaces, rusted and filthy, stacks of decaying pizza boxes, dishes, pots, pans, plastic tubs, and signs reminding employees to wash their hands. There was another door, though. Not just the cooler or the freezer, both of which she noted, but a door in the far end of the room, by the sinks on the other side of that tray return window. The only question here was, did she want to open that door?

No, she did not. And not because she was scared of finding someone. She wasn’t. Although the restaurant had been long abandoned and the local hooligans knew it, no one was living here. No one was cooking in this kitchen, not dinners and not meth. No one was bringing food back here to eat out of Mammon’s infrequent yet torrential rains and throwing the wrappers on the floor. She saw plenty of vandalism, but only the kind that came with breaking in and breaking out again, running away fast and laughing about how scared someone else had been. Of broken windows, broken lights and broken fake animatronics, there were signs everywhere, but of empty bottles, old needles and soggy condoms, there were none. 

No, no one else was here, but once she started looking, she’d never stop. Pot didn’t make her paranoid too often, but the potential was always there and this place was too big, too dark and too long abandoned. There’d always be shadows at the corner of her eye, always weird sounds half-heard under the storm. She wouldn’t find anything—there was nothing to find—she’d only end up giving herself the heebie jeebies. This was no place to get the heebie jeebies in sober, let alone high. 

Ana backed out of the kitchen rather than turn her back on that innocent door. She stood for a moment on the threshold, then turned fast and aimed her phone’s light down the dark hall.

Another fake animatronic, maybe sixty feet away, in the rounded juncture of three hallways. A signpost had been set up, with arrows pointing in all directions, and this new animatronic-that-wasn’t stood next to it. It was the pig, wearing bib overalls cut short at the knees to show off her shapely gams and pink-painted hooves. With freckles on her snout and her hair done up in hooked braids like a porcine Pippa Longstocking, she could not have screamed ‘hayseed’ louder than if she had one stuck between her teeth. Like Brewster and Swampy, the pig was fixed in place, forever posed in a jaunty hi-there with one fist on her curvy hip and the other hand raised and splayed. That elbow, and that elbow alone, was jointed, suggesting she could either wave or maybe point down one of the many halls that terminated in this hub if a kid too young to read asked her for directions.

The pig’s introductory sign had fallen off the hay bale to which it had been affixed, but Ana did not head over to investigate. There was a lot left to this place she hadn’t seen (and deep in her heart, she still hoped to find the real animatronics, not the New Faces) but in spite of all her internal scolding, she had begun to feel uneasy. She didn’t want to lose sight of the exit. More, she didn’t want to let someone-who-was-not-there get between her and the only way out. 

“It’s not the only way out,” she told herself and she knew she was right. She’d seen other doors on the exterior of the building as she’d circled around. Granted, they might also be blocked off with crap, but even if so, a busted chair or a table-leg made a pretty good weapon in a pinch. Not that she needed to be thinking of weapons. Honestly, that roof was far more likely to kill her tonight than any phantom stalker watching her from the shadows.

And no one was here. That was the most important thing of all. No one was here but her.

Ana headed down the hall toward the signpost, already squinting to try and make out if any of the arrows pointing off from the pole said Pirate Cove or Gallup Gulch or anything like that. As it was, the only one angled so she could read it was the one that said Security. Was there a police station stage? She couldn’t imagine a pizza parlor needing all that much security, but then again, after James Joyce Reardon, maybe the owners decided there was no such thing as too much security.

Just clear of the dining room, however, the wall abutting the main stage opened up into a niche of sorts, just perfect for someone to lurk in and leap out of, so when she caught a glimpse of pale color out of the corner of her eye, she swung hard in that direction. If her phone was a spear, she could have killed it. 

And she’d have felt pretty silly, seeing as she’d have killed a cardboard standee with a poster of…

“Freddyland?” Ana read aloud.

The pig, the roof, and the possibility of skulkers in the kitchen forgotten, Ana moved the rotting velvet ropes keeping customers at bay aside and got right up in that niche.

Freddyland, said the banner in letters four inches high, like it was something to be proud of. The map beneath was cartoonish, oversimplified and out of scale. It looked like an island, surrounded on all sides by an artificial moat in which several ships crewed by anthropomorphic animals sailed. The fact that they were drawn to look like animatronics, with jointed jaws and elbows and glassy-wide eyes only made them more creepy, not less.

Across the bridge into Freddyland was the main street, lined with shops, because capitalism was king and how better to enter a themepark than with a thousand screaming kids whining for a Foxy plushie or a Freddy hat? Main street branched off into a tangle of interlocking paths that led to and around various themed hollows, each with their own band of featured animatronics. There was Swampy’s Bayou, Gallup Gulch and Brewster’s Rockin’ Barnyard, as well as Fairy Tale Forest, the Monkey Kingdom, the Bunny Patch and at least a dozen others. And of course, there was Pirate Cove, where kids with parents willing to pay extra could join the animatronic crew of either the Flying Fox or the Lion’s Pride and help Captain Fox and Captain Blackmane chase each other around the entire island. If the animatronics weren’t enough, there were also roller coasters, tilt-a-whirls, swinging hammers, threading needles, flying carousels and every other kind of ride guaranteed to threaten life and limb. Carnival games? Hell, Freddyland boasted the largest boardwalk arcade in the world and tickets were as good as cash at any of the gift stands. There was something for all ages at Freddyland: a butterfly garden, a petting zoo, a gondola ride, a monorail, a water park area, mini-golf, a haunted castle, a dinosaur dig, and junk food, junk food everywhere. Dead center of this, like the iris of an unblinking eye, was the Grand Pavilion Hotel where Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica had center stage, smiling and waving.

It shouldn’t have been awful, but it was, and the longer she looked, the more sinister it seemed. Why, for God’s sake? When she was a kid, wouldn’t she have died to go someplace like this? Hell, she’d have died just to go the pizzeria, but a whole park? Freddy’s and Disneyland rolled into one, not just four animatronics, but a hundred of them. A dream come true, right?

Why then, did it feel so much like a nightmare?

Well, it had never happened. And never would, if the condition of this place were any indication. The plans, like the pizzeria, had been left in the dark to rot.

Still, she stared, loathing it but unable to look away…

…until the deafening drumming of the storm slackened and she heard the footsteps.

Not her imagination. Not the rain. _Scraaaape_ -thud, _scraaaape_ -thud, slow but inexorable, spiking out the fine hairs all over her body.

It came from deeper in the hall, from the dark beyond the pig and the signpost. She knew this and could have run the opposite way, back through the dining room and out the gift shop window into the rain. She didn’t have to look and see what hideous, rotting zombie-thing was coming for her, hungry. She didn’t.

Ana turned and raised her phone.

Its light hit Freddy in the chest, illuminating his filthy, mildewing, plastic body and the rotted remains of his black bowtie, still neatly knotted around his neck. She didn’t have to raise it any higher. His eyes lit up, flashing through the layer of dust and grime, and from somewhere deep inside him, music began to play (not a nursery song, although she was connecting it on some weird level with cartoons). In one hand, he gripped his microphone, but the other was empty and reaching out from clear back there to grab her.

“HEY KIDS,” he said, picking up one rotted-fur foot and putting it down ahead of the other, steady as Poe’s pendulum. “TIME TO PLAY.”

She did not startle. She’d heard Freddy say those words a thousand times on Aunt Easter’s tapes. And it was the same voice, deep but friendly, fundamentally bear-ish, even if the speakers weren’t up to snuff anymore. Time had corroded something in there, but it only gave his voice a little rumble, which was fitting for a bear. If it wasn’t for the circumstances, it wouldn’t even sound all that creepy.

No sooner had that thought flitted through Ana’s mind than a new voice chirped out, “I LOVE TO MAKE NEW FRIENDS!” way too fucking close. 

Ana jumped back, her light jerking aside, and here came Chica, her sunny color dulled out to dead-canary yellow, eyes lit up and shining over a beakless black hole filled with teeth. “I’M HUNGRY,” chirped a happy girlish voice, rendered tinny through an old speaker. “LET’S EAT!”

No, not creepy at all…if this were still a pizzeria. If it were daytime and if they weren’t broken down and filthy. If. But in the middle of the night, as spoken by an animatronic zombie—fuck that, time to go.

Ana spun, but it was too late. At the other end of the hall, arms out to block escape, was a huge, greyish-purple hulk. Long, jointed bunny-ears swayed and dipped at every lurching step. His eyes…his eyes were two red dots deep in the cavity that had been his face. His lower jaw hung by a single screw, the fur rotted out so that his peg-shaped teeth dangled across his chest like a necklace. All the rest was hanging wires, bent framework, and the grinding of gears.

Ana’s breath hitched in and left her in a hoarse, horrified, “Bonnie?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING! This book contains strong adult themes, including adult language, drug and alcohol references, sexual themes, violence, and scenes of child abuse. Future episodes will contain graphic depictions of child abduction, violence towards children and adults, graphic gore violence and explicit sexual content. I am not kidding. This book should probably not be read by anyone. 
> 
> Five Nights At Freddy’s is the creation of Scott Cawthon. The characters of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Mangle, Toy Freddy, Toy Bonnie, Toy Chica, Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fredbear, Springtrap, Plushtrap, the Puppet, Balloon Boy, and the Purple Guy, as well as Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, belong to him. Everything else is a product of my own imagination and no similarity to actual events, locations, or people is intended or should be inferred. Do not reproduce, repost or copy any part of this story without my permission. 
> 
> As always, a sincere thank you to all those who took the time to rate and review if you liked it (or even if you didn’t like it). If you are interested in my non-fanfiction work, feel free to check out my blog at rleesmith(dot)wordpress(dot)com or look me up on Amazon.

#  CHAPTER FIVE

The thing stopped moving at the sound of the name. Its head rocked back a little, as if surprised. When Ana moved toward him, it took half a step back.

“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh Bonnie…what happened?”

She never remembered running to him. She was just magically there, reaching up to touch the jagged edges at the side of his faceless head and explore the damage in a helpless, sorrowing way while he stood there, mechanical parts clicking and humming. His eyes were gone and only one of the cameras that fed him visual information was still in its socket. Tugging her wet sleeve over her hand, she cleaned his lens, then swabbed out the empty socket beside it and peered at the plug. 

“BONNIE,” said Freddy from down the hall. His eyes were still flashing, although the music had stopped.

Bonnie raised a hand in a strange, unfinished gesture that started out looking like he meant to grab her and ended up showing Freddy a _Give me a minute_ air-pat as Ana picked through the bent and broken pieces that had collected in the bottom of his head. That weird other-vision she had, the one that let her see how things fit together, mentally straightened, restored and reassembled the wreckage, but only up to a point. Too many pieces were broken, too many lost, to give him back the face she remembered. 

There! The other camera, slipped from his broken eye-socket and buried in the rubble. She pried it out, wiped it off, and plugged it in. It whined to life while she was still looking for a wire to connect it to the main optical base and the dilated lens contracted to mirror the size of its mate. The red lights inside the cameras blinked off and came back white, giving him a brighter stare, but only a slightly less demonic one. The bits of metal that had survived the destruction of his eye-caps twitched and flopped as he tried to blink eyelids that weren’t there. He raised his hand again, holding it up before his ‘face’, lenses whirring as he waggled his fingers, then looked at her. 

“BONNIE,” Freddy said again.

“I’M OKAY, FREDDY,” Bonnie replied, lowering his arm. Something inside him clicked several times. “HI.”

“Hi,” said Ana.

“THE RESTAURANT IS NOW CLOSED,” Freddy said. He stopped moving and now stood with Chica in front of the signpost. Chica was tapping her fingertips together in a nervous way, looking back and forth from Freddy to Bonnie. “YOU HAVE TO LEAVE.”

“I can’t, the road’s washed out,” said Ana, standing on her tiptoes to get a better look inside Bonnie’s head. His endoskeleton came with its own set of jaws, set well in from where his muzzle used to be. The teeth were small, hooked inward like those of a shark, rustless even after all this time. She pried them open, or at least, she pried at them and Bonnie opened up. His mouthpiece had detached but was still in there, a flapping funnel of rubber or silicone or something, dropping down into the back of his throat. When she lifted it, a spider scuttled out and away to a quieter part of the animatronic’s body. “Oh Bonnie,” she said, heartbroken. “Who did this to you?”

The black box half-hidden beneath his hanging jaw coughed out a little dust and another spider as he said, “MY NEW FRIENDS.” There was a bit of a stutter on the first and last bits, as if he’d clipped the words from a much longer phrase, but she didn’t recognize it. And it didn’t matter. She knew well enough what had happened. There would always be a certain kind of person who could only entertain themselves by smashing something.

“THE RESTAURANT IS NOW CLOSED.”

“Uh huh, I heard you the first time. And I still don’t care. The road’s washed out. I can’t go anywhere. Quit moving, Bonnie. Hold still. Let me see it.”

“RULE NUMBER ELEVEN: KEEP CLEAR OF THE ANIMATRONICS.”

“I’M OKAY, FREDDY. Sh-Sh-She’s fine,” Bonnie added, not at the usual room-filling volume and not in the exaggerated hee-haw accent, but in a conversational, albeit stuttering, aside that held only a trace of Texas. His cameras shifted in their sockets to send Freddy an eyeless stare. “She’s f-f-fine.”

Freddy grunted, folding his arms. “THE RESTAURANT IS NOW CLOSED.”

“Relax, Freddy,” she said, aiming her phone around the interior of Bonnie’s head. God, there was so much damage, almost too much to even see, but it all appeared to be framework and general filth. There were a few hanging wires, but not many, and nothing looked charred to suggest hot sockets. So it looked bad…it looked very bad…but it was fixable. “I have special permission or something.”

Freddy’s eyes narrowed, upper and lower lids both. “NO. YOU. DON’T,” he said, biting off each word from a different phrase—first, surprised Freddy, then happy, then confused—with a pause of one or two seconds between. The overall effect struck a visual resonance in Ana’s mind—that of an old-timey ransom note made from cut-up newspaper headlines. He followed up with a friendly Freddy-laugh and, “GOOD GIRLS AND BOYS NEVER TELL LIES,” a familiar sentiment made ominous combined with his expression.

“Yeah, yeah, you got me. I’m no good girl. Hold still, Bon.” Sticking the phone under her chin, Ana reached into Bonnie’s head, both under and over his jaw, and felt around. “Socket seems okay. Frame’s bent, but this thing feels intact,” she said aloud, exploring the oddly rough bones of his endoskeleton more by touch than sight. She was not talking to him so much as to herself, continuing the habit of a solitary lifetime. She talked to everything—her truck, the television, her tools. “I think you just need a screw.”

Bonnie’s ears twitched. “Lady, we j-j-just met.” 

She laughed, startled but not shocked. How many times had David told her? They talk. They weren’t just like those toys where you pull a string or squeeze a paw and they say the same old tired shit. They listen to you. They understand you and they really talk. 

Sure, okay, most of what they said had to be pre-programmed responses to the sorts of things little kids were apt to say, but they could pick up new words and phrases and parrot them back. The more they heard something, the more likely they were to say it themselves. When the pizzeria was in operation, they doubtless had someone weeding out the four-letter contributions every night, but over the years, with no one to keep an eye on their expanding vocabulary and the magnetic attraction this abandoned building had for the local teen rebel set, this place was less a pizzeria than a locker room. 

“Moving too fast for you, am I?” she teased, once more focused on the task at hand. The mess of machinery was overwhelming to the outer eye, but her inner eye was optimistic. Bonnie’s jaw was, at its most basic form, just like hers, only with metal sockets instead of bone and springs instead of muscles. The longer she looked at it, the less intimidating its design became. “You know, I think I can fix this.”

“R-Really?”

“NO,” said Freddy. “THE RESTAURANT IS NOW CLOSED. YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE. RULE NUMBER EIGHT: LEAVE BEFORE DARK. YOU ARE TRESPASSING.”

“I can’t promise it’ll be as good as new, but I’m sure I can jerry-rig something better than this.” She gave his jaw a careful wiggle. “Next time you sneeze, you’re going to send this across the room. Want me to try?”

“NO,” Freddy said again.

Bonnie’s head cocked. His ears twitched, then swiveled around and lowered. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “T-T-Try.”

“Bend over and let me have a grope.”

A chuckle scratched through Bonnie’s speakers. He said, “ONLY IF WE TAKE TURNS,” in his too-cheerful stage-voice.

Further back in the hall, Chica clicked hard and said, “IT’S MORE FUN WHEN WE ALL TAKE TURNS.”

“Hey, hotwings is up for it,” she remarked, frowning into the mess in Bonnie’s head as she picked down through layers of scum, silicone and wires in search of the missing spring. “What do you say, big bear? Want in on the orgy?”

Freddy grunted. It was such a churchy sound of disapproval that Ana had to smile. He followed it up with a buzz-killing, “THE RESTAURANT IS NOW CLOSED.”

“Are you seriously going to say that every ten seconds all night?”

“P-P-Probably,” Bonnie muttered, his cameras rotating in that direction. “Our n-n-nights are p-pr—PRETTY TODAY, CHICA!”

Chica jerked back like he’d slapped her, then giggled, patting at her head, and said, “THANKS! I JUST HAD MY FEATHERS DONE!”

“Pretty open,” Bonnie concluded. “Sorry, Chica.”

“IT’S OKAY,” said Chica with a shrug. “ACCIDENTS HAPPEN.”

Freddy grunted again, slouched a little closer and said, “YOU HAVE TO LEAVE.”

“Look, I keep telling you, the road—”

“THE RESTAURANT IS NOW CLOSED,” Freddy boomed, right behind her now. The light from his eyes caught a glint of steel—a spring. “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE. RULE NUMBER EIGHT: LEAVE BEFORE DARK. THE RESTAURANT IS NOW CLOSED. THE RULES ARE FOR YOUR SAFETY. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE.” He took a moment, the air cycling in and out of him like hot breath on the back of her neck, then said in that odd, choppy way, “I. DON’T. HAVE. TO. LET. YOU. LEAVE.”

Ana picked the spring out of the mess of grunge and wire and wiped it off on her shirt front. One of the ends looked okay. The other had broken, but she thought she could still make it work if she straightened it out an inch or so and then shaped it a new hook, a matter of a minute’s work with her needle-nose pliers, but those were packed away in the very bottom of her toolchest, with half the crap in the universe boxed up in front of it. She could probably get at the screws and maybe a screwdriver. It only had to last until…

Until what? She could unpack the truck and come back with the proper tools? She wasn’t coming back.

Freddy’s hand dropped over her shoulder and clamped down hard. “THE RESTAURANT IS NOW CLOSED,” he told her, pushing his face so close that she could feel the heat of his processors and hear the humming of his internal works. “GO. NOW.”

Ana looked back at him, annoyed, then clenched her fist around the precious spring and went nose to rotting black nose with the bear. “There is a sign on the side of this building that designates Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria as an emergency shelter according to county code ordinance number whatever-the-fuck number it is,” she said, killing the flashlight app on her phone and tapping up the weather app. She held the phone up and pushed the screen right in his face, where the bright yellow alert banner reflected itself in a dull bar across his muzzle and part of his cracked cheek. “There is a goddamn emergency going on right outside and I don’t have to go anywhere.”

Freddy’s eyelids slanted down at an inward angle and his head tilted. His plastic pupils shifted from her face to the phone and irised smaller as the cameras behind them focused. His eyes moved left to right as if he were reading.

“There is a flash flood warning for the entire county,” she said. “A lot of roads are washed out, including Old Quarry Road, which is under a foot and a half of water at the moment, and do you know what’s right downstream of the current?”

Freddy’s eyes shifted back to her and he grunted low in his throat.

“The quarry,” Ana informed him, “for which Old Quarry Road is named. My tires lose grip with the ground just once and I float away on the goddamn tide. If you throw me out tonight, my blood is on your…”

Now her head tipped. She blinked a few times as Freddy glared at her, then turned the phone around and looked at the screen herself.

It was 63 degrees in Mammon. The weather was presently thunderstorms, as indicated by the little lightning cloud icon. There was a severe weather condition alert in effect, which was expected to remain in effect until 4:15 am. The flood warning banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen, constantly updating its list of affected areas.

“You’ve got wifi here,” said Ana stupidly. “How the hell is that a thing?”

All three animatronics exchanged glances as Ana looked around at the utterly devastated and abandoned building, then down again at the screen of her phone, which showed full signal strength. Curious now, she turned the flashlight app back on and retraced her steps to the kitchen, hunting around the walls until she found a lightswitch. She gave it a flick.

Nothing.

She couldn’t say she’d expected anything different, but if there was no power in the building, where was the wifi coming from? The pizzeria was the only manmade structure with any kind of utilities for miles in any direction. Whatever was putting out the signal had to be here.

Freddy’s footsteps were approaching. “THIS IS THE KITCHEN,” he called. “THIS IS WHERE WE MAKE DELICIOUS PIZZA. BUT THE OVENS CAN GET HOT, SO FOR YOUR SAFETY, YOU SHOULD GO. LEAVE NOW. TIME TO SAY GOODBYE, KIDS. THE RESTAURANT IS CLOSED. LEAVE NOW.” He reached the doorway, gripping at the half that had no door to block it anymore, and glared at her. “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE.”

Maybe the animatronics themselves…? Rumor had it they’d had access to some kind of child predator database, that they could scan people’s faces and contact the cops if some pervert were hanging around, but Ana knew it wasn’t true, or if it was, it had a loophole the size of James Joyce Reardon in it. Anyway, even if that were true, if the animatronics were somehow mobile wireless servers, what was powering them? They sure weren’t getting any other kind of maintenance.

Maintenance.

Ana looked down at her hand and the spring she was still holding. Right. Looking around at the cooking junk cluttering up the kitchen counters, shelves and floors, she found a large spoon of the sort that had once been used to ladle out marinara sauce. The years had not been kind to it, but the handle was still pretty sturdy-looking. She picked it up. 

“THIS IS THE KITCHEN,” Freddy said again.

“Good for it. Take a walk in the cooler and chill out. I’m busy.”

Freddy’s head tipped back. Speaking again in that ransom-note manner, he said, “I WILL. LET. YOU. LEAVE. IF. YOU. LEAVE NOW.” His head cocked. His gears clicked and turned. “IF. YOU. DON’T.” His head turned the other way, his eyes narrowing. “I. WON’T.”

“I’m shaking in my boots, big bear,” Ana said, wrapping the too-small coils of the spring around the handle of the spoon and doing her best to straighten it out. “Bonnie, I think I’m ready for you!”

A few notes of that unknown-yet-familiar tinkling tune spilled out of him and Freddy released the doorjamb to take one heavy step into the kitchen, but only one.

Bonnie’s ragged hand reached out from the darkness to grip Freddy’s arm. “Let-t-t her t-t-t—TRIAMPHONIC CONDUCTORS PROVING PROBLEMATIC—try.”

“THE RULES,” Freddy began.

“Talk t-to me about r-r-ru-rules when it’s your face hanging-ing off. Look at m-m-me, Freddy.” Bonnie reached up with both hands to grip the jagged sides of his head just above his hanging jaw. His voice lowered to a scratchy, staticky hum. “For G-G-God’s sake, look-k-k at me.”

Spoon and spring mostly forgotten, Ana watched in wary fascination as Freddy shut his eyes for at least ten seconds, then opened them and turned his head to stare into the naked cameras that were Bonnie’s eyes. She was high. She knew she was high. She sure didn’t think she was _this_ high, but there was no way in the actual fuck what she was looking at right now had any but the most tenuous connection to reality. What were they really doing, if this was what she was hearing and seeing? And should she be even attempting repairs on the poor bastard if she was high enough to imagine any of this?

Freddy’s head turned again, now looking at Ana. Wordlessly, he moved aside to allow Bonnie to come into the kitchen.

“Come on over here,” Ana called. “Give me a hand.”

Freddy and Bonnie both clicked hard, and Freddy’s arms twitched up, but it was from far back in the hallway that the sound of plastic applause came.

Ana looked up from her spoon. “Was that Chica giving me a hand?” 

Bonnie spread his arms in a helpless sort of shrug. “You as-s-sked for one.” 

Yeah, she had. And this was a kid’s place, with kid-friendly animatronics. Feed them the right lines and they would tell the same kid-jokes over and over and over and over.

“Come here, Bon. If you’re going to stand there, make yourself useful, Freddy,” she ordered, offering her phone. “I need a…another pair of hands.”

Freddy folded his arms, filling the doorway, immoveable.

“Seriously?”

Freddy grunted. _Seriously,_ said that grunt. Also, _Get out_ and possibly even _Fuck you._

Ana lowered her phone, huffing out a laugh. “How tall are you?”

Both Freddy and Bonnie leaned back, looked at each other, then looked at her again.

Ana waited.

“SIX FEET.” Freddy shrugged, arms still folded. “TEN INCHES.”

“Good b-b-boys don’t tell l-l-lies,” Bonnie muttered and Freddy shot him an irritated glare. “Wh-What? The hat-t-t doesn’t count. You’re not-t-t a hair taller than six-six and you know it-t-t.”

“Well, it’s official, then,” said Ana. “You are the biggest ass I’ve ever met. This is your friend,” she went on, pointing at Bonnie, who had clapped one hand up to the part of his face where his mouth would be if he had one, smothering a laugh that came out of his speaker anyway. “And here you are, taking shots at me when I’m only trying to help. You’re Freddy goddamn Fazbear! I know you don’t care about me, but helping your friends is supposed to be what you do!”

Bonnie, no longer laughing, but still cupping his non-existent mouth, looked at Freddy, moving nothing but his cameras.

Freddy didn’t move, although that music came and went a few notes at a time for maybe a minute. Then he unfolded his arms, took four slouching, heavy strides, and snatched the phone out of Ana’s hand. “WHAT ARE YOU UP TO TODAY?” he asked with a hearty laugh belied by his furious expression and flashing eyes. 

From clear back in the hall came a chirpy, “I’M COOKING UP A BRAND-NEW RECIPE FOR PIZZA! THE SECRET INGREDIANT IS FISHSTICKS,” but Freddy did not continue the routine.

“I remember that one. I always kind of thought it sounded pretty good. No, just hold it,” Ana told Freddy, adjusting the phone in his hand. “Like this, like it’s a flashlight. Okay? Bonnie, bend over, I can’t do this on my tiptoes. Just…that’s good, that’s fine. Hold still, both of you.”

Using the ‘good’ side of Bonnie’s jaw as a guide, Ana went to work restoring as much of the bent framework as was necessary to reattach his jaw. She didn’t try to get an exact match; that would take tools she couldn’t get to at the moment, but she didn’t need one. All she needed for right now was a solid socket and when she had one, she worked the spring’s hooked ends into their proper holes. The bottom one went in easy, but the top one—the one she’d had to reshape—gave her trouble. It wasn’t quite the right curvature and taking length out of the body of the spring meant it was no longer the correct size to fit between the two parts; she could still make it work, but the pull was intense, making it difficult to guide the hingepin into the proper socket at the back of Bonnie’s head.

“Hold still,” she murmured, standing on her tiptoes to better see the mess she was making. “Just relax, we’ve almost got it. It’s right—God, I can feel it, but I can’t…quite…get the…fucking…”

The rest became a swiftly indrawn breath as the spring slipped, snapping back across her hand and biting itself in. In tight-jawed silence, Ana unhooked herself from Bonnie’s jaw and inspected the damage, first inside his mouth, then on her palm. It wasn’t deep, except where the end had buried itself in her tasty thumbmeat. It bled, though, which was going to make the spring even slipperier and her job that much harder.

Her throat unlocked with a hissy, “Shit biscuits!” 

“Sh-Shit b-biscuits?” Bonnie echoed. She could hear the smile if he couldn’t show her one. “That’s a new one.” The humming inside his head changed pitch as he focused his cameras on her hand. “You all r-r-r-right?”

“Yeah,” she said sourly, flexing her fingers. She wiped the blood off on her wet jeans until the flow at least slowed, then stuck her hand back into his mouth and felt around for the spring. 

“Are you-u-u bleeding?”

“Yeah, but don’t panic. There’s very little chance of you becoming a were-human if you don’t swallow, and since you don’t have a mouth at the moment, you’re probably okay.”

“Were-human.”

“Yeah,” she said distractedly, once more doing her best to crawl into Bonnie’s head and fit that fucking spring. “Beneath the light of a full moon, the dreaded were-human takes on his flabby form and rampages through the countryside, a slave to his human instincts.”

“Which w-w-would be what, exactly?”

“I dunno. Although he’s evil, so I’m sure neckbeards and Nickelback are in there somewhere.” 

“Heh.”

“BONNIE,” said Freddy.

“Hey, I was j-j-just making-ing conver-r-r-sation!”

“YOU. MADE. ENOUGH.”

Now watching from the doorway, Chica chimed in with, “I ALWAYS MAKE ENOUGH TO SHARE WITH MY FRIENDS! LET’S EAT!”

“THIS. IS. NOT. OUR. FRIEND,” said Freddy, looking straight at Ana.

She looked back at him for a moment, then turned her full attention back into Bonnie’s mouth. “Six-foot-ten, huh?”

“Six-six,” Bonnie corrected, glaring over her bent head at Freddy.

Freddy grunted and stood up a little straighter.

“Hold still, going to try this again,” she muttered, trying to maneuver the spring into place with just the tips of her second finger on her left hand and her pinkie on the right, while all the other fingers did their best to keep the area clear of invading pieces of debris. “Be nice if I could see what I was doing through all this shit.”

“Watch it-t-t-t, lady. That sh-shit used to be-e- _eeeeeee_ —” He reached up and gave his throat a slap. “—my face,” he finished.

“Sorry, nothing personal. It’s right there. I can feel it, I just…can’t…reach…Got it!” she said with savage triumph as Bonnie’s jaw snapped up and locked into place.

He reached up almost at once to feel at it. The tiny lights in the dark recess of his head flickered and whined as his cameras focused on her face. 

“How’s that feel?” she asked, wiping off her hand again before sticking it back in the hole in his head, feeling at the socket on both sides of his jaw, blindly comparing the two. “Think that’ll work for right now, my man?” 

“Yeah, it’ll d-d-do,” he said, pushing up and down on his jutting jaw. Then his head cocked. “M-M-My man? Aren’t you a little late t-t-to the Sixties?” 

“Still a bad world, isn’t it?” she asked, trying to smile for him, smiling into that awful black hole. And sang it, softly, “ _It’s a bad, bad world we live in and no one to be a friend. There ain’t no hope. There ain’t no God. There ain’t no heaven at the end. Just a sad, sad world that swallows us, but if you give me your hand, I’ll be your baby girl tonight if you’ll be my man._ ”

Freddy looked back and forth between the two of them in the silence that followed her impromptu serenade, then put the phone down hard on the nearest countertop and said, “THE RESTAURANT IS CLOSED. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE. NOW.”

“The road’s w-w-washed out,” said Bonnie, still staring at Ana. “She’s st-st-staying.”

“BONNIE…” Freddy’s internal fans gave an extra-hard wheeze, as if he’d sighed. He stepped back out of the kitchen doorway, pointing at the dining room. “STAY IN THE DESGINATED SHELTER AREA,” he told her.

Ana nodded and moved past him, taking one long step into the dining room and standing there, her hands clasped behind her back, the very picture of the quiet and obedient little girl she had never, ever been.

Freddy studied her, unfooled, then cast Bonnie an oddly accusing sort of glance for a plastic face to make, and slouched off down the hall again. He met with Chica over by the pig and Ana could hear them muttering at each other in metallic voices, although she couldn’t make out their words. Bonnie joined her, standing close beside her and aiming his faceless head down the hall like he was watching them, too. When Freddy and Chica finished their routine and disappeared into the darkness, Bonnie turned his head and ‘looked’ at Ana.

“HI THERE,” he said in his stage voice. “I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

The song was still spinning around at the back of her head, so that her first response was to sing, “ _You don’t need to know my name. You’ll know me by my scars,_ ” followed by a, “Oh, I do not like the way that’s flapping,” as she gave his free-floating lower jaw a wiggle. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”

He nodded and promptly made a liar of himself by following her across the dining room to the gift shop. There, in the doorway, he stopped and watched as she climbed onto the counter and out through the broken window into the foyer.

Ana kicked the gate a few times on each end to loosen the tracks and managed, with a little effort, to lift it another foot and a half. Not enough to quite crawl out, but not the squeeze it had been getting in either. She was a girl who took what she could get.

Out she went into the rain and over at a jog to her truck. She climbed into the cab first, pulling her day pack onto the seat and unbuckling the front flap. She fished through her various supplies until she found the actual aspirin and dry swallowed one, then—what the hell—took another pink pill from the strawberry-stickered bottle, because spending the night in this place was bound to get on her nerves after a while and it was only smart to wear down some of those edges now. Sliding the rear window open, she struggled halfway through it and into the covered bed, where she could just reach her toolchest. Prying up the tape gave her thumb a painful reminder; she sucked at it, tasting blood, while she rummaged by feel through the compartments for a few likely-sized screws, then to the drawer below for a screwdriver.

Silly thing to do, given the scope of the damage done to Bonnie, but she’d started a job and Ana Stark did not half-ass a job. If she could get at her dremel and soldering iron, she’d have a go at reforming the framework. Maybe there was a mask or something in the gift shop that would do for his face. She wished she could do better for him than that, but even if she had a whole hobby store at her disposal, she doubted she could; give her the parts and she was confident she could patch him up, but she was not a fabricator. 

Give her the parts…

Were there parts? What was she thinking, of course there were! They couldn’t transport the animatronics off-site every time one of them needed a lube and oil change, so it stood to reason some spare parts were hidden away somewhere. Vandals would have worked it over a few dozen times, but who would steal a spare pair of animatronic eyes? And why?

Briefly, her little-pink-pill-and-pot-fueled imagination tried to conjure up a back alley in Disneyland, where a suspiciously mouse-shaped figure whipped open his natty raincoat to display row upon row of animatronic eyes for the purchasing perusal of a nervous Mr. Chuck E. Cheese. The temptation to settle right here in the cab, smoke another joint and see where that vision led her was compelling, but Bonnie was waiting. Now was not the time.

Ana scooped up her day pack and held it on her lap, drawing out this last moment before she had to brave the rain. Rain, ha. It had been raining when she went into Freddy’s; now it was…she didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t raining. The sound of the storm on the truck’s roof was the sound of a great bucket dumping itself eternally out. Water sluiced over the windshield and down the windows, curtains of water, distorting her view of the world beyond, but she could see enough that she needed to reassure herself she was safe up here. The Old Quarry Road flooded out every single year. In her Aunt Easter’s words, as long as she didn’t see an ark and a row of animals marching up the gangplank two-by-two, all was well.

Her well-lubricated imagination kicked in for the second time, but it wasn’t a giant floating zoo she saw hovering indistinctly behind the rain, but Aunt Easter’s kitchen. She could see David sitting in his chair, reading the back of a box of cereal, squinting because he was having one of his I-hate-my-glasses moods. She could see another bowl set beside him, waiting for her. She could see Aunt Easter talking on the phone by the window, looking so young and pretty as she’d laughed.

But it was raining too hard to hold onto and moments later, it was gone.

Like David. Like Aunt Easter. Gone. Not dead. Dead would almost be better. Just gone. She wished she could believe they were together somewhere, but wasn’t high enough to pull that off. They were gone. Eaten by this godforsaken town, thought Ana, and that thought, too, conjured an image: a grey-bearded dude in a toga, reclining on clouds in the sky, waving his trident (gods still had tridents, right?) so that its pronged shadow fell over the distant town of Mammon, far below. ‘Forsaken,’ this fellow boomed, and lightning flashed—

Lightning did flash then, turning rain to snow for an instant and revealing the road as a river that stretched out as far as her eyes could see. Thunder crashed. _Forsaken_.

Ana opened her door and climbed down from the truck. Hugging her day pack, she waded across the parking lot to the far corner of the building where she could see it all. The tide lapped at the incline, but ominous as that was, it couldn’t hold her attention. She stood, already drenched to the skin, her hair flat to her skull and clothes painted to her body, watching the water splash and roll across the road and out, out, inexorably out, to the open throat of the quarry. She could see it with every flicker and spark of lightning—a monstrous mouth, Charybdis of Utahan legend, howling as it drank the storm. 

That was where David was, she decided. Not gone at all, but eaten. Fed to the town monster. Swallowed. And here was Ana, who had escaped those jaws once, only to come back. Did she really think she could escape again? And did she really want to? She was the last of her line. What better sacrifice for the town monster? She could walk out there right now, stand on the rocks where she and David used to play pirates, and dive. And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough. The storm would end, the sun come out…maybe David would spring from the black water like Pegasus from the corpse of the kraken, and God would take back his forsaken town, roll credits, the end.

She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, mesmerized by the water and the circling of her own bleak thoughts as they swirled around her own internal quarry, but it all stopped when light, pale as moonbeams, splashed across her hoodie in stripes. She looked down at them, then around at Bonnie’s camera-lights, watching her through the boarded-up side door she had not realized was there. When he saw he had her attention, he moved a step back. She heard something rattle, then clank, then snap, loud as a gunshot even over the rain. Heavy chains dropped to the ground inside the building and the door creaked open behind the boards.

“COME ON IN, KIDS,” he invited, giving the boards a much-restrained kick to loosen the nails without either breaking the plywood or knocking the whole thing off in one piece. “WELCOME TO FREDDY FAZBEAR’S PIZZERIA! IT’S TIME TO ROCK! You’re g-g-g-etting wet-t-t,” he added.

“Well, _now_ I am. You just broke a chain for me, you sexy beast.” With one last look at the road, Ana dropped to her knees, pried the board up enough to push her day pack through and crawled under after it. “And they say chivalry is…dead,” she finished distractedly, shining her phone up at the smirking, supercilious face of yet another of those fake animatronics. “How many of those damn things are there?”

Bonnie’s cameras shifted to follow her phone’s beam and some of the bits inside his broken head fluttered, going through the mechanical motions of an expression he couldn’t make anymore. A scowl, to judge by his tone when he said, “T-T-Too many.”

This one was the cat, mostly black with a white chest, face and paws. It wore a black bowtie and a hard, inflexible plastic formal coat with tails, but in such a way it was clear he was a well-dressed servant rather than an aristocrat. His back was very straight and his chin raised, smiling with a closed mouth and closed eyes. One of its ears had been broken off and carried away for a trophy, which somehow did nothing to soften his obsequious attitude, but instead gave it a dangerous edge; not like a butler with a scar, but like a gangster in a suit. TUX, the obligatory sign read. _Tux is the concierge at the Grand Pavilion Hotel. He loves helping his friends by finding information they may need. He can answer any question! Ask him anything!_

“So, in other words, he’s got Google,” said Ana, wiping her face dry, or at least drier, on the sleeves of her soaked hoodie.

She hadn’t bothered to read the sign aloud, yet Bonnie was either able to deduce the origin of her comment or was just programmed to agree in situations lacking context. “Yup-p-p.”

“Tux, what’s the record for heaviest rainfall in a single night in Mammon, Utah?” Ana asked, now squeezing excess water out of her braid.

Tux did nothing.

Ana leaned out to either side of the animatronic cat, but saw no keyboard or monitor or any sign there had ever been one. There was a heavy-duty power cord snaking out from the heel of one hind paw, but plugging it into the conveniently-located outlet did nothing. “How do I get him to talk?”

“He d-d-doesn’t anymore. Pow-ow-ower’s out. All the an-n-ni-nimat-t-tronics are shut-t-t down.”

“You still talk.”

He shrugged and offered her a hand, since she was still on her hands and knees, looking up at Tux’s smug-looking face from a child’s perspective. She took it, although she was careful not to put too much of her weight behind it as she got to her feet. His left leg didn’t look like it moved very well and she didn’t know how good he was at gauging his own balance these days.

“Hold this,” she ordered, passing him the phone and helping him angle it at his face.

He did, but said, “Why?”

Digging in her pocket, she brought out her screws and showed them to him. “Told you, you needed a screw.”

His ears waggled. “Sure th-th-that’s what you meant.”

“You got a dirty mind and I like that in a bunny, but one thing at a time, my man. Hold still.”

She was a good judge of sizes, even at blind guesses, and she found a screw that fit his jaw on her second try. Getting it in there was a little harder, as she had to work around not only the odd shape of his jaw, but all the jutting pieces of his broken framework for his mouth and muzzle, and the moving parts of his endoskeleton.

Bonnie stood motionless, apart from the occasional whirring and humming as his eyes tracked her hand or just focused on her face. After she finished and gave his jaw an experimental tug, he stepped back and reached up to tug at it himself, then handed her phone back, almost like an exchange. “You j-just carry that stuff ar-r-r-round with you?” he asked, nodding at her hand as she re-pocketed the extras.

“Never know when you’re going to need a good screw. Question. Who the hell is that?”

He turned around (not easily, not on that leg) and followed the beam of her phone’s screen to the image of a very curvaceous bunny, long floppy ears tied back in an oversized bow that had more fabric than all the rest of her clothes combined. She was holding up the Girls sign for another set of restroom doors while a cutout of Bonnie himself manned the Boys door.

“That’s e- _eeeee_ -either Lala or Missy, I forget wh-which,” he said. “But those are the only t-t-two lops, so it’s g-g-got to be one or the other.” 

“Are they around, too? I’m sure I didn’t see another bunny on the wall.”

“What…? Oh, that. No, th-th-they’re not here. I’m the only b-b-bunny.”

“Damn straight, you are. You are the _only_ bunny.” Ana started to open the bathroom door, but one whiff of the trapped gasses released by this unthinking act changed her mind in a hurry. The pot was working better than she’d realized; she knew better than to explore the bathrooms in an abandoned building. Although she stepped back in a hurry, Ana lingered in the hall, running her light and her gaze over the very grown-up curves of the bunny on this allegedly kid-friendly pizzeria’s door. “Missy, huh?” 

“Or Lala. Th-There’s a big poster in the b-br-break room with-th all their names on it if you really want to know. I c-can take you b-b-ba-ba—BACKSTAGE—back there, but you-u-u have to be quiet so Fr-Freddy doesn’t find out.”

“Yeah, what was up with Freddy?” Ana wondered, now shining her light up and down the hall. Tux on her left marked the terminus point of this end of the hall, which ran all the way down to the foyer on her right, with at least two more doors besides the restrooms in-between. However, almost dead ahead of her opposite this side door was a short corridor, opening into what appeared to be a big open space, like another dining room. Her phone didn’t show much, but she thought she could see tables. “When did he turn into such a hardass?”

“Ab-bout s-s-six seconds after he was switched-d-d on,” said Bonnie, his words accompanied first by a metallic snort through his speakers, then by a forgiving shrug. “He’s not-t-t that bad once you get to know him. He’s j-j-just…protect-t-tive.”

“I guess he’s got a good reason to be,” said Ana, taking in the vandalism here in the hall with a pointed glance as she shrugged the strap of her pack off her shoulder and held it out. “But I’m not going to wreck the place, I promise. I’ll be the best-behaved trespasser that ever broke in. Think can you give me a hand for a sec?”

Bonnie’s answer was a garbled mess of static and stuttering as he brought his twitching hands up and vigorously clapped.

Ana sighed and looked at the water-stained ceiling. Bonnie ducked his head and stared at the chipped, muddy floor.

“Sorry,” he said. “I swear I’m not d-d-doing it on purpose.”

“I know, I know. You warned me.” Shaking her head, she offered up her pack again. “What I meant to say was, can you hold this for me? No offense, but I kind of don’t want it touching your floor.”

“I sure c-c-can’t blame you. P-P-Pass it over.” 

He took her pack and held it in both hands as she unbuckled the clasp and brought out the towel she always carried. While Bonnie watched, she wiped her face, rubbed at her hair, daubed at her arms and, after looking in vain for a towel rack to manifest itself out of the ether, hung it over Tux’s head. She felt better, which was weird because Bonnie was for sure still watching her, and that damned closely. 

“I guess I was just expecting him to be different,” Ana remarked, thinking of Freddy again as she bent to unlace her boots. She couldn’t pick the knot apart with one hand, so she tucked her phone under her chin. “Like he used to be. Stupid of me, I know. Franchises change their mascots all the time. I just wish they’d left him alone. I wanted to see the real Freddy.”

“You d-d-did,” said Bonnie. “He is.”

“Yeah, but no. I mean the old Freddy. The real…never mind,” she said, realizing she was just about to imply he was not the ‘real’ Bonnie. He didn’t have feelings to hurt, but she still changed the subject by pointing down the adjoining corridor (catching her phone as it was toppled loose by this action and tucking it back under her chin). “What’s down there?”

Bonnie turned in that direction and looked. His ears dropped back. “P-Pirate Cove.”

“All the way out here? Damn it,” she interrupted herself as her phone slipped its precarious position again and clattered to the floor. “Here, can you hold this?”

Bonnie took her phone and turned it without needing instruction so that its light fell on her. He watched her take her boots and socks off with idle interest, but his head cocked and his ears came all the way up as she then peeled herself out of her soaking hoodie. “Whoa. Awesome,” he said, which she thought was a funny comment on her stripping in the hall until he nodded at her arm. “Can I s-s-s—SEE WHAT I MEAN—see?”

Ana looked down at her tattoo, pulling up the short sleeve of her tee so he had an unobstructed view of the whole thing. His cameras whirred louder, moving slowly from the coils of the Midgard serpent knotted intricately over her forearm, up the roots of Yggdrasil to the two ravens locked together by the talons over the highest branches of the World Tree.

“Cool,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said indifferently, eyeing it herself. “Friend of mine got it for me. He has a real boner for all that Viking shit. Would have got it himself, but he’s already so inked up, it would have got lost in the crowd. So he got it for me.”

“You d-d-don’t like it?”

“I like it,” she said, draping her socks and hoodie over Tux. “But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t mostly get it to make Rider happy.”

“B-B-Boyfriend?” he asked in what struck her as a hilariously over-casual tone.

“Rider? No.”

His ears perked up. “Ex-boyfriend-d-d?”

“Not even. Just an old friend and occasional employer.” She winked at him. “Totally available here, Bon, and looking for a bunny with benefits.”

“Yeah, b-b-blow some more, lad-d-dy,” said Bonnie, but he waggled his ears. “G-G-Got any others?” 

“Yeah, as a matter of fact.” She showed him her left arm.

“Oh wow,” he said, squinting at the gold, grey and black lines linked together all the way around her wrist. “I th-th-thought that was a bracelet.”

“It was, once. But I was working at a bakery back then and they wouldn’t let me wear it. Said the clasp would break and I’d lose it in the batter or whatever. I didn’t want to quit wearing it,” she said, studying the simple design as if it were archeological evidence of a previously undiscovered civilization, “so I had it inked on. Which was horseshit in retrospect, because I hated the job and gave it up six weeks later anyway. Then I lost the bracelet.”

“Clasp-p-p break?”

“Of course it did. It’s not a great tattoo,” she added, squinting at it. “It wasn’t even that goddamn great a bracelet. I don’t know what was going through my head at the time. I was probably high. So…whatever. But hey, there’s this one! You’ll like this one.” She tugged the neck of her t-shirt down to let him see the tattoo on her chest. 

Across her chest, beginning just under her collar bones and moving down in ragged lines, were three long tattooed slashes, not quite parallel, and a fourth offset from the others, as if carved by one sweep of a monstrous, clawed hand. The edges were a little pink to show the wounds were fresh, but not gory. She had no blood to spill. Inside, she was mechanical. Her own metal endoskeleton framed a hollow interior, filled with interlocked gears, riveted pipes, hanging wires and rusted pins, but the focus of the piece was the empty place where her heart would be…if she had one. 

Bonnie looked, but said nothing.

“You don’t like it,” Ana realized, a smile tugging at her lips. She thought the animatronics at Freddy’s were programmed to like pretty much everything. If Chica asked a kid what his favorite subject at school was, lo and behold, it was always hers too. If anyone asked Bonnie to play a specific song on his guitar, why, that was always Bonnie’s favorite song. When Freddy leaned over some young artist’s shoulder as she illustrated her funnest day at Freddy’s, it was always to tell her what a great drawing that was and could she please draw one for him to keep? Every kid who ever walked through the pizzeria doors was wearing a shirt advertising an animatronic’s favorite book or movie or superhero or soda, but Bonnie did not like Ana’s tattoo. “What’s wrong with it?”

“N-Nothing-ing. Just…hits-s-s a little too c-c—CLOSE BUT NO—close to home. Got-t-t any more?”

Just the new one on her back, but she couldn’t show him that without also showing off the mess under it. Although she doubted the animatronics were programmed to call attention to someone’s scars, she wasn’t going to risk it. 

Ana shook her head. “Nope. You?”

“Got d-d-drawn on with a Sharpie once,” he said, shrugging. “D-Does that count?”

“Ink is ink, my man. I like my men with ink.” She took her tee off and wadded it up around her hand. “Come here.”

“D-D-Dear P-Playbunny,” he said, ears twitching straight up. “I n-n-never thought your letters were r-r-real…”

She laughed harder at that than she should have. “Let me wipe your mouth out, you perv,” she managed at last, still grinning. “I bled in there, remember?”

“Oh. R-Right. Were-humans.” Bonnie tipped his head forward and let his lower jaw hang open as far as it would go. She didn’t like the way that spring sounded, but it held. He stayed still, apart from the movements of his cameras, as she dabbed at the mess in the bottom of his head. She wasn’t sure how much of her blood she got up, but she sure got a lot of the grime and there was so much more to get. In the end, she didn’t finish cleaning as much as just give up and hang her now-filthy shirt over the Know-It-All cat.

“So there’s still a Pirate Cove, huh?” Unzipping her jeans, Ana writhed in place, shedding the wet denim with all the dignity and grace of a drunk snake, but managed not to turn around and show him her back. “Is Foxy still around?”

“Mm-hmm,” said Bonnie in a vague way. “Yeah, he’s…he’s a-a-around.”

“Awesome.”

“Yeah.” He snorted again. “Foxy is ev-ev-everybod-d-dy’s favorite.”

The complete lack of feeling in his voice made her look up with a smile, wondering when the Fazbear people had decided to retcon in the obvious animosity. Or maybe it had always been there. Pirate Cove had always been off to one side of the main stage, even if it had always been in the dining room until now. She could remember watching Aunt Easter’s tapes and seeing Freddy have to call Foxy out on at least one occasion, coaxing him, getting the whole crowd of kids to shout out too, before Foxy finally pulled back his curtain. Only Freddy, never Bonnie or Chica. And once Foxy did appear, the others made themselves scarce. 

“Not everyone’s,” she said now, meaning him.

“Oh yeah?”

She unhooked her bra. “Yeah.”

His ‘gaze’ dropped. His ears twitched again. He watched her get naked without making a sound, other than a low mechanical whirring, until she’d hung up the last of her wet things and reached for him. Then he said, “D-D-Dear Playbunny,” again and gave her exactly the sort of nervous giggle that would come bubbling out of any guy in his situation. “Okay, um…heh…look, I n-n-need to warn-n-n you, I’m not-t-t as fully-ly-ly functional as you, uh, you s-s-seem to think-k-k I am.”

She laughed and opened her day pack, still clasped and apparently forgotten in his hands.

He looked down at it with a facelessly foolish expression of surprise as she moved things around and pulled out her spare clothes. “Oh.”

“But I like the way you think,” she said, patting the broken side of his cheek.

Ana stepped into a clean pair of panties and a dry t-shirt, debated whether or not it was worth it to put pants on too, then put them on anyway. She just felt weird being pantless in public, even if no one was here to see her, except the animatronics. “You want to go look?” she asked, taking her phone back from Bonnie. 

“Look-k-k? What? No! I wasn’t-t-t looking-ing! What?”

“Pirate Cove,” Ana said, extracting her day pack from his clutches and hanging the strap over Tux’s fat neck. “Want to see Pirate Cove with me?”

His cameras whirred and the broken mechanisms around them jerked and fluttered. “Why?”

“Never seen it before.” She shrugged. “I’ll never see it again. I kind of want to see it all while I can.”

He glanced down the corridor, then all the way back down the long hall toward the dining room. “Sh-Sure, okay, but be-e-e- _eeeeee_ —”

“Quiet,” she supplied as he smacked his speakerbox. “I will. Lead the way, my man.”

“Stay-ay close.” He took a step, paused, and looked back at her. “Baby g-g-g-girl,” he added, head cocked, as though testing the words.

It took her a second to realize where he’d picked that up and another second to think how weird that was, after only one reference, that he hadn’t tried singing it or something. Curious, she sang, “ _I’ll be your baby girl tonight…_ ”

And be damned if he didn’t join in right away, switching the PoV around like it was a duet, even though the song itself had only come out this last year and there was no way in the world he’d heard it anywhere but from her: “ _…and I’ll be your man._ ”

But God help her, that was creepy coming from a faceless animatronic rabbit with spiders crawling in and out of the cavities in his rotted-out plastic body.

Oblivious, he held out his hand.

Ana looked at it for a second, but she took it. His cold metal fingers closed around hers, suggestive of a tremendous strength, but gentle. How many hundreds, if not thousands, of little hands had he held over the years? How many giggling little girls had he sung to?

But tonight, he was her man, and she felt it all over again—that swooping disconnect between what she knew in her head was real and she hoped in her heart could be. It was a feeling that was perhaps lubricated by pot and pills, but not wholly responsible for it. She was here, that was all. She was finally here, at the magical place she had always known could save her, and here was Bonnie, taking her by the hand and bringing her with him out of the storm. She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

“Better late than never, right?” she said, forcing her shaking voice through a determined smile.

“Yeah.” His ears rotated back and lowered, astoundingly expressive even without a face. “Better anything th-than never. C-Come on.”

He led her down the corridor, the walls of which were decorated with murals: on one side, the Flying Fox, with animatronics of all kinds crawling up the rigging and waving swords alongside cartoonish little kids; on the other, the Lion’s Pride, helmed by a massive, leering lion who could only be the infamous Captain Blackmane, surrounded by a crew of curvy lionesses. The two ships blasted away at each other while on the nearby shore were midway rides, most of them with an aquatic theme—the swinging hammers were both ships, the whirling dervish’s arms were tentacles around a huge squid head, and the coaster was called the Cannoneer. Yet another reminder of the wonders awaiting them in Freddyland. 

Bonnie waited for her while she looked her fill at the murals, then took her on into the Cove. A big room, as big as the main dining room if not bigger, done up like an amphitheater, with curved benches dropping stadium-style away on her right in a horse-shoe shape around a curtained stage. There, Bonnie’s attention was directed and there it stayed while Ana let go his hand and explored. The nautical theme continued wherever she looked. Fishing nets strung with glass floats, anchors and the occasional starfish or squid decorated the walls. Seagulls hung from mechanical arms along the ceiling, their restless circling long stilled. 

Midway along the rear wall of the room, the pointed bow of a pirate ship protruded. Just the bow, though, with no gangplank or any way to access the deck, with the mast and crow’s nest towering all the way up to the ceiling. She knew it was a crow’s nest because there were three crows perched on the bucket-thing. Someone had been using them for target practice; not only was the wall behind them pock-marked with bullet-holes, but one of the crows was missing its head and another was missing one wing. On this side of the ship, plunder in the form of sturdy wooden barrels, crates and other cargo completely filled the corner of the room. While some of the stuff—bags of foam beads marked Spices of India or the rotted remains of animatronic parrots in tarnished cages—had not survived the test of time and neglect, most of the stuff still looked pretty solid and must have been a tempting target for climbing kids, especially in these litigious times. Directly across from the corridor, past a scattering of tables where grown-ups could sit and watch over their kids down around the stage, was a pair of doors leading back into the main part of the restaurant, and over in the corner, thrown into shadow on the other side of the crow’s nest, was a cave.

It was a neat cave, carved in realistic fashion, with parts of what had once been an entire skeleton sprawled to one side around a faux-wooden sign that read FOXY’S TREASURE CAVE and _Beware_! Dark stains that were probably meant to be blood had splashed up over the sign and skeleton both…also the wall and floor. Kinda on the dark side for a kid’s place, but what the hell. You couldn’t have a pirate without _some_ blood.

Although she wanted to check out the stage, Ana could see another cave-like opening down by the corner of the curtain, and she figured, given the geography of the building and the split level of the room, the only place for the Treasure Cave to come out was down there by the stage anyway, so she headed on in with Bonnie right on her heels.

The first little space was the typical Stop Ye and Go No Further warning carved into the wall, along with a cute little poem about how there were doubloons buried deep in the cave and guarded by a mermaid, and those lucky enough to find it could take it to the captain to trade for a special prize. Beneath the carved poem was a small canted shelf, where once little paper treasure maps had been available so kids couldn’t get lost in the maze, but all the maps had been scattered long ago and what hadn’t rotted away had been trampled so thoroughly into the floor that there was no getting one up.

It didn’t matter. From what she could see, the so-called maze was a lot of dead ends branching off the one and only way through. At worst, a person could only get turned around and wander back out, but it would take a pretty stupid kid to even do that much.

“You okay in here, my man?” Ana asked, navigating her way down the sloping floor of the maze, intensely aware of Bonnie right behind her and who he’d be falling on if that leg of his gave out.

“You k-k-kidding? I c-could walk th-th—THALAMIC DEVIATION AT THE POSTERIOR TRACT—this place backwards. S-Sorry about that,” he added, sounding a bit embarrassed. “Getting my w-w-wires cr-crossed or s-s-something.”

That was obvious. The voice that had come spitting out of him mid-sentence had not been his own at all, although it was familiar in some indistinct way and she had the strangest feeling it still would be even more if it weren’t distorted and broken by static like it was. “All good in the hood, my man,” she said, eying him inquisitively. “What did you say?”

“I d-d-don’t know. It ju-ust started one d-d-day last year. It wasn’t t-t-too bad at f-f-first, but it’s gotten a lot-t-t-t worse lately.”

“Yeah, but what’s it mean? Thalidomide…deviants up the ass crack or whatever?”

“No idea,” he said around a laugh. “It’s j-j-just something-ing I say. Here. You’re g-g-gonna miss it.”

Ana paused and looked back, certain she hadn’t missed a turn, only to see Bonnie reach out and push on the wall. The fake stone-looking panel swung open like a door and there was indeed an open space beyond.

“Wow,” she said, impressed in spite of herself. “A secret room!”

“The mermaid’s g-g-grotto,” he explained, holding the door while she ducked under his arm and then letting it wheeze shut on what sounded like a very tired spring. In the light of her phone and his eyes, the room’s full claustrophobic dimensions were revealed. The great glass window dead ahead of the door gave the illusion of depth, but an illusion was all it was. It had been sized to hold no more than six kids comfortably, or one adult Ana and one giant bunny somewhat less than comfortably. She could have touched any wall in the room from the spot where she stood. The blunted tips of foam stalactites brushed at her hair; poor Bonnie had to hunker just to be here with his ears as flat to his head as he could get them, and still he scraped the ceiling. 

She took his hand again, since she had to bump up against him anyway, and put her phone right up against the dingy glass to try and see what was behind it instead of reflecting off the window itself. It didn’t help that the glass seemed to be tinted and warped by design, making everything beyond look like it was underwater, but all she could see was what appeared to be sheets laid out at different levels, dirty gray and tattered. There were a few indistinct shapes in the greater darkness beyond them, but her phone wasn’t up to the challenge of illuminating it.

“Here,” said Bonnie again, and pointed. There was an old timey hand crank there, rusted and dusted to blend in almost invisibly with the wall. “You have to wind her-r-r up,” he explained.

“Why?” asked Ana, not moving. She didn’t like the looks of those sheets and liked the looks of the dark shapes hiding behind them even less. “What’s going to happen?”

“W-Wind it and see-e-e-e.”

She didn’t want to, but she put her hand on the crank and gave it a half-hearted tug. It didn’t move. Rusted tight. Too bad.

“I got it,” said Bonnie, moving her hand aside. The crank was no match against animatronic strength and, after an initial shriek of metal, it turned. When he let go, gears continued to grind away, unseen in the walls. There was a sound more like something breaking than something working, and suddenly the sheets tore open—not sheets at all, but spiderwebs, filling the chamber top to bottom and side to side—and something leapt out of the black directly at her.

Ana jumped back, slamming into Bonnie, who laughed his metallic laugh and caught her.

“It’s just the m-m-mer—MASCHINENGHEIST—mermaid,” he explained.

Ana watched, sickly fascinated, as it ‘swam’ out of the dark and came right up to the glass to ‘stare’ at her. At one time, maybe there had been fans or something to help her long hair and wing-like fins float, adding to the illusion of being underwater, but not anymore. Time had ravaged her to her bones. Her pearly skin had split, showing the metal framework and rotting padding beneath, so that it was half a beautiful face and half a steel skull that peered through the glass back at her, veiled by tangles of filthy dollhair and spiderwebs. 

“Another new face at Freddy’s?” Ana guessed, reaching out to tap on the glass. The mermaid did not react. Her lidless eyes were full of dust.

“Not e-e- _eeeeee_ —even. T-T-Tux and the rest are at least-t-t interactive ar-r-round the kids. This is j-j-just a wind-up.” 

And it didn’t appear to have been wound up enough. Bonnie gave the crank another turn. Mechanisms clanked and rattled; the mermaid flipped backwards with the help of a rod imbedded in her side, no longer disguised by the kelp beds and improbably flowering seaweed that littered the floor on the other side of the glass. It was the rod that moved her over to the treasure chest half-sunk in decaying foam painted to look like sand. Like a tintoy penny-bank, the mermaid’s arm moved and the treasure chest opened, not quite in sync. Something hidden in the works clanked and rolled down an unseen chute and bumped up against a plastic window below the glass.

Since Ana didn’t move, Bonnie bent down and knuckled the window open. “Hey, l-lucky you,” he said, coming up with an oversized coin. “You g-g-got a gold one.” 

She took it from him, feeling the differences at once between this cheap knock-off, however prettier and shinier it might be, and the real thing she’d once known. It was plastic, because everything was these days, stamp-molded with a picture of Foxy’s grinning face on one side and a skull and crossbones on the other. The one David had given her…God, twenty years ago…was also stamp-molded and, truth to tell, not stamped as well. It had been some kind of metal, not too heavy but not too light either. Foxy’s face had been in three-quarters profile rather than full-on and showing his teeth instead of smiling. The skull and crossbones had not been as detailed, but not as goofy either, made in a time when toy-makers didn’t care so much about scaring little kids. Pirates were supposed to be scary.

“It’s a d-d-doubloon,” Bonnie was telling her, mistaking her silence for confusion or curiosity. “You’re suh-huh-posed to give those to Foxy and he— _eeeee_ —he gives you…I don’t know. Wh-Whatever cheap shit-t-t-t he gives out.”

Ana nodded, silent. She knew.

“Th-they used to only give ‘em out-t-t at parties,” said Bonnie, looking at the mermaid as she swam mechanically back into her grotto. With the webs torn, she was still visible, lurking low to the ground where the kelp beds might have hidden her once. Her arms were open, her head bent forward. She looked like a drowned corpse. “The silver ones were wor-r-rth a few prize tickets. Only the birthd-d-day kid got a gold-d-d one to give to Foxy. Either way-ay-ay, you had to t-t-turn them in before you left-t-t.” He took the crank and gave it a quarter-turn, not winding it again, but pulling the slack out of it. The mermaid rocked back, her arms dropping to her sides and her head coming up as she settled in a kneeling position, the metal bones of her tail wrapping around her side. “Ch-Cheap guys in ch-ch-charge didn’t want k-k-kids walking-ing off with free souvenirs.”

“That’s not why you couldn’t keep them,” she heard herself say. The small space and concrete floor tried to make echoes for the foam walls to baffle, making her voice into a stranger’s. “They were cursed.”

“H-Huh?”

“The treasure,” she explained, turning the doubloon over again to look at Foxy’s face. His smiling face. His happy, harmless, smiling face. “You couldn’t keep it because it was cursed. You had to give it back to Foxy or he’d come after you. The writing on the wall didn’t mention that this time.”

“Yeah, I g-g-guess they took th-that part out. Some little sh-sh-sh—SURE IS A GREAT DAY FOR PIZZA—kid would t-t-try to pocket it once a m-m-month, just t-t-to make Foxy ch-chase him around the r-r-room.” Bonnie raised his hand, one metal finger curled in an approximation of a hook, his voice screwing out into a not-very-flattering impersonation of his co-entertainer: “Yar, ye-e-e scurvy wee- _eeeee_ blighter, take yer th-th-thievin’ hands off me gold-d-d or I’ll split ye l-l-lights to liver and wear-r-r yer guts-s-s for garters!”

“Replace ‘gold’ with ‘lucky charms’ and you just did the scariest cereal commercial of all time,” Ana remarked, still studying Foxy’s face on the doubloon.

“Thanks. Anyway, th-th-they took out the c-c-curse bit. Too sc-sc-scary for kids. Or th-their moms. Kids love Foxy.” His head tipped as he regarded her. “Foxy’s fast-t-t. And he doesn’t throw a race. You must have run like the d-d-devil.”

“No,” she said. “Not me. I’ve never been in a Freddy’s before. Someone gave me the coin.” She thought about it now, amused to think she’d never thought about this particular part of it before, and smiled. “It wasn’t his birthday either. He must have stolen it.”

“Didn’t believe in c-cur-curses, huh?” 

“No, he did. We both did. He only gave it to me because we believed it was really cursed.” She laughed without feeling it. “And Foxy would really come to get it back and split the thief lights to liver. We were counting on it.” 

She raised her eyes, but Bonnie wasn’t looking at the doubloon. The sight of his lenses floating back there in the empty gape of his head, framed now by his lower jaw below and ears above, with jagged plastic all the way around, eclipsed this old and familiar unhappiness with something far newer. She put her plastic coin in her pocket and forced a smile before she could fall too deep into depression.

“So,” she said with false cheer. “We gonna make out or what?”

His ears came up, slapped the ceiling, and went down amid a dry scattering of foam crumbs. “What?” he stuttered, not in the mechanical skipping way, but just laughing as he said it. “I d-d-don’t mean that as the wh-what of ‘or what-t-t,’ like that’s my answer-r-r, because it isn’t-t-t. I just mean, you know…what?”

“Isn’t that why you brought me here?” 

“Hey, I f-f-followed you!”

“Must be why I brought you here, then.” She stepped closer, right up against him, and he not only let her come, but put his arms around her. She could feel the cool metal grip of his left hand pressing on her back and the scratchy fur of the other considerably lower. “You grabbing my ass, Bonnie?” she teased.

He leaned out a hair to check. “Not quite.”

“Want to?”

“Kinda,” he said in that laughing way. “You m-m-mind?”

She laughed with him, but her smile had gone crooked. So much for a childlike sense of nostalgia. Twenty minutes into her very first trip to a Freddy’s and she was coming on to the animatronics. And honestly, she was a little afraid to know how far Bonnie was willing to go, given some of the things he had to have seen in this place over the years and how fast he appeared to pick things up and add them to his programming. Dear Playbunny indeed.

On impulse, and not unmindful of the risk of spiders, she stood up on tiptoes, closed her eyes and pressed her lips to the very center of his jutting lower jaw. He smelled bad; he tasted worse; she kissed him anyway, thinking, ‘This is what it’s like to kiss Death.’

He didn’t move at first, and when he did, it wasn’t to grab her ass, but to bring his arms slowly up, his hands slipping under the damp rope of her braid. She tensed, but hell, his hands were plastic, where they weren’t worn away to the steel bones. He couldn’t feel the scars. She relaxed under his careful pressure, allowing him to pull her closer against his chest, where she could not only hear his insides working, but feel them, like a heartbeat. And that, she supposed, was what it was like when Death kissed you back.

“Okay,” he said when she leaned back and smiled at him. His voice was odd; it was hard to say how. “Okay, that was sp-sp-special.” His head tilted. “Who…Who _are_ you?”

She laughed and pulled away, twisting out of his grip and through the secret door almost as one slithery movement, made easy by the tiny dimensions of the treasure room. “I’m the one that got away. And I’m going to get away again if you’re not careful.”

He followed her out into the corridor, awkwardly bent, his broad shoulders scraping both walls at once, and waited until she peeked back around the far corner at him to say, “You’re s-s-seriously going to make me ch-ch-chase you.”

“Only if you want to catch me.”

His head cocked, long ears catching on the rough walls. “What-t-t do I get if I d-do?”

She winked. “What do you want?”

His answer was a low, staticky chuckle as he started forward and she fled.

He knew the place backwards, he’d said, and even a kid’s maze like this could be disorientating when it was dark and her first time. He was always just one corner behind her, always just one wall between them, but she had the advantage of two working legs and she soon put more distance between them. She could hear the clank and slide of his footsteps getting further and further behind, until she couldn’t hear it at all anymore.

She kept going for a little while, but stopped when she reached one of the maze’s rare crossroads, peering down each tunnel in turn and finding only darkness in each. She listened, but the foam walls making up the tunnels did a great job of eating sound. She waited, but it wasn’t very long at all, maybe only a few seconds in the stifling silence, that she wondered if he might have gone back to the dining room. Kids must get bored and wander off in the middle of the game all the time; he wouldn’t keep playing forever.

“ _Oh, I been lost a long, long time and I ain’t been found yet!_ ” Ana sang and held her breath.

The sound of servos whirring answered, but the acoustics of the maze made it impossible to know from which direction or how far. It did not come with footsteps.

“ _And you ain’t gonna save me…_ ”

Wait, was that a footstep? Was he waiting for her to sing before he moved?

“ _…just by taking me to bed,_ ” she sang, straining her ears to try and hear through her own voice, never quite sure what she was hearing beyond it or if she was hearing anything at all. She took a few steps down the mouth of the likeliest-seeming tunnel and switched her phone on for a quick check. Nothing. “ _You don’t need to know my name—_ ”

“ _You’ll know me by my scars,_ ” he sang right behind her.

She jumped with a girlish cry and swung around, phone up and light on, to catch a glimpse of him in the tunnel behind her, now moving fast and nearly on her. She raced away, laughing, and once again, the chase was on. 

Careening through the maze, scraping wall to wall in the dark, bumping up against dead ends and darting back, gaining ground and losing it, until the maze unexpectedly opened up and she came tumbling out at the foot of the stage in Pirate’s Cove.

The curtain was moving when she shone her phone’s light up at it, as if hastily dropped. Or as if it had caught a draft. 

But it wasn’t the wind making that rustling sound on the other side, that soft _thump-pad-pad-pad_ of something heavy moving away on a cushioned surface. It wasn’t the wind that stopped, aware of her, when she reached out and pulled at the curtain, seeking the divide.

The fabric felt awful in her hand—old velvet, clotted with dust and with damp—but it was still pretty. A deep purple, embroidered here and there with gold stars, which was odd in its own way, that it wasn’t fish or pirate ships or even skulls and swords. But it was nearly the same curtain that had been in Pirate Cove at Circle Drive and it would be Foxy on the other side. She knew it and even though she didn’t need to see him, wasn’t even sure she wanted to, she pulled the curtain wide.

There was a ship, not like the hip-high plastic prop from the other Freddy’s and not a climbing toy like the one in the playground, but a real wooden ship, like something that had sailed up and beached here on the stage. The Flying Fox, notorious in song and story, retired in disgrace here in Mammon, Utah. It would never sail again; the mizzenmast had been omitted so the stage designers wouldn’t have to worry about where to put sails and rigging. The saucy figurehead was gone—probably decorating some punkass kid’s bedroom—and several unfinished graffiti tags littered the hull, but these things only added to the appearance of a derelict vessel. The left side of it was open, not vandalized but built broken, like it had come out the worse for tangling with a reef or with one of the many dragons Captain Fox had battled over the years, giving those in the audience a glimpse of the piles of gold-painted plastic swag filling the hold. On closer inspection, she could see what might be an animatronic octopus clinging to the lintel over the cabin door, at least half its tentacles creased with dirt to suggest they could move.

To the left of the deck, its port side, where Foxy had been wont to make troublemakers walk the plank, was a souped up version of the ball pit she remembered from the tapes; not just a kid-sized bouncy pit anymore, the entire stage was meshed in from the hull to the wall and a good ten feet high, discouraging kids from throwing balls out into the crowd. At one time, the mesh had been brightly painted and it still showed the ghosts of waves and shark fins when the light from Ana’s phone hit it just right. It was also still four feet deep in plastic balls, although she wouldn’t like to find out how many years of collected slime and rat shit might be hiding beneath it. The stench coming out of the ball pit hinted that some of those rats might never have left. 

But as bad as the smell was, it wasn’t enough to send her away. The gangplank was down over the hole in the hull and the cabin door was open, so Ana put one knee up on stage, preparing to board.

“YAR, THAT BE FAR ENOUGH,” a harsh voice snarled, way too close and directly above her. “THERE BE NO STOWAWAYS ON THE FLYING FOX!”

Foxy, or rather, the thing that had once been Foxy, had been standing in the bow, right there, just watching. Now he leaned out over the side of the ship and into the beam of her phone’s light, illuminating the ragged reality of the cartoon face stamped on her doubloon, glinting off the steel points of each tooth. His eyes lit up as if meeting her phone’s challenge, but they didn’t match. The one on the left was yellowed and dim through a film of dust and time; the one on the right, the one he kept beneath the patch, glowed whiter but not much brighter. 

“You,” Ana said.

“AYE.” His hook—a real metal hook that came to a very real and apparently very sharp point—slammed down on the rails of the deck and gouged out fresh splinters as long as Ana’s fingers. His hand, bare to its steel bones, reached around to his waist and drew an equally real and perhaps equally sharp cutlass. “IT’S ME, CAPTAIN FOX. GATHER ‘ROUND, ME HEARTIES AND I’LL-L-L—I’LL SPLIT YE LIGHTS TO LIVERS!”

He had come through worst of all of them, as impossible as that was to imagine, seeing Bonnie. He had no fur left, only the discolored patches that showed where fur had been over a plastic casing so cracked and pitted that every limb, every single section, had broken open. Across his chest were the worst wounds, three of them, open wide enough to expose his metal bones and all the interlocking machinery of his internal systems. It was not quite the mirror to her own tattoo, but close enough to give her a dark jolt.

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. She was high, she knew she was. Just like Bonnie was talking, but not saying the things she heard, so Foxy might be broken, but not in that way. They were not the same.

“’WARE, YE SCURVY SEADOG,” Foxy growled as she stared. “YE BEST RUN WHILE YE CAN OR I’LL BE FEEDIN’ YE TO THE HUNGRY SEA.”

“Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you?” Ana said faintly, still staring at those scars. “You always sail away in the end. You always let me drown.”

His head tipped back.

“L-L-Leave her alone.” Bonnie limped out of the mouth of this end of the Treasure Cave maze, ears flat and eyelids angrily slanted. 

Foxy watched him come, then pointed his cutlass down at Ana and said, “Eh?” in a remarkably expressive tone.

“Come on,” said Bonnie, taking the curtain out of Ana’s hand and letting it drop on the Flying Fox. “Sh-Sh-Show’s over in the C-Cove.”

Ana started to answer, but just then the door on the other side of the room banged open and there like the wrath of God was Freddy.

“THIS IS NOT THE DESIGNATED SHELTER AREA!” he bellowed, already in full angry-eyes mode.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m going.” Ana started up the stairs, but stopped halfway there and turned back. 

Foxy had come down off the ship without her hearing. Now he was right there on the stage, with the curtain pulled back on his hook, watching her leave. His hat, coat and boots were all gone. All that was left of his pirate garb was ragged deckhand breeches tied on with a bit of rope, but he was still the captain for all that he’d lost. 

She looked at him. He looked at her. There was no one else left on Earth.

“You know, for years I thought you’d gone to the wrong house,” she heard herself say. She didn’t plan to. The words came out without any forethought, as if they’d been always been there. She said them like she’d said them a thousand times already and still fresh, like it was one of the stories Foxy himself used to tell, and she’d listened for the first time, every time, on those damn tapes. “But you didn’t. Keeper of the cursed treasure, my ass. You didn’t care. You just let it go. You let _him_ go.”

Foxy looked at Freddy, but Freddy was watching Ana, so Foxy looked back at her. He took a step forward, sheathing his sword and letting the curtain drop behind him, and stood there, wearing her scars like he had a right to them. 

“He loved you and you let him go,” Ana said. “Did you even know he was _gone_? No, of course not. How could you? He meant _nothing_ to you. You had a hundred more just like him, but he was all I had, you son of a bitch! He was all I had!” Her throat tightened. She said it anyway, pushing words like knives out and letting the blood fall where it would. “He loved you. _I_ loved you. And you sailed away like you always do and let us both die.”

Bonnie took a step toward her. Ana backed away, fumbling at her pocket with shaking hands to pull out her gold doubloon. She threw it.

His metal hand flashed out and caught it before it could hit him. He looked at it and at her.

“Keep your cheap shit,” she whispered. A whisper was all she had left. She turned and climbed the rest of the stairs on rubbery legs. Snatching up her pack, she raced down the long hall and back to the dining room, leaving Pirate Cove twenty years behind her.

# * * *

Freddy was the first to break the awful silence that followed the girl’s flight and he did it with the very last words Bonnie ever could have expected him to say: “GO. AFTER. HER.”

Foxy took a step.

“Not y-y-you,” Bonnie snapped, turning around with some difficulty. “She’s n-n-nothing to d-do with you. Go aw-w-way.” 

“G-Go away? Th-Th—THIS HERE BE PIRATE—This is where I l-live!” Foxy looked again at the plastic prize token the girl had thrown at him, then threw it aside. It bounced off the hull of the ship and rolled right back at him. Foxy stomped on it, but the stage was padded. The coin did not break, just sat there on the stage, staring up at him with his own face. “What th-the hell was th-that about anyway? Who is she?”

“I was j-j-just about to f-f-find out, no th-th-th—THANKS, CHICA!—thanks to you,” Bonnie said, beginning the long and treacherous climb up the steps. There was a ramp on the other side of the amphitheater, but that would mean a longer walk. His leg was already acting up and chasing the girl through the maze had not done it any favors.

Chasing the girl through the maze…

Bonnie shook his head at himself, although the glare that went with it was all for Foxy. “L-L-Leave us alone.”

“Us?” Foxy echoed, following him pace for pace along the edge of the stage. “Not e-even ye but us?” Giving up on Bonnie, he turned around to face Freddy. “Who is she? And wh-what in the bleeding _hell_ is sh-sh-she doing here, running free in the b-b-bleeding halls?”

“I DON’T KNOW.” Freddy twitched one shoulder. Maybe a shrug or maybe just a glitch in his wiring. They were all doing a lot of that these days. “IT’S. RAINING.”

“Eh?”

“The r-r-road’s washed out,” Bonnie explained, heaving himself one step at a time up the stairs. For a place designed to seat little kids with little legs, these stairs were steep as hell. “Flash fl-fl-lood. She c-c-can’t get home.”

Foxy reared back and stared at them, both of them, his eyepatch raising so he could do it with both eyes. “So bl-bloody what!” he managed at last. “What are w-w-we running here, a d-d-damned hotel?”

“Yeah, apparently.”

“EMERGENCY,” Freddy agreed, taking of his hat to rub at his plastic brows like he had a headache. It had been years since Bonnie had last seen him do that. “THIS RESTAURANT IS A DESIGNATED EMERGENCY SHELTER.”

“She quoted county or-or-or-or…damn it, law. She quo-oh-oted county law at us. It d-d-doesn’t matter,” said Bonnie, having finally reached the upper level. “She’ll be g-g-gone in the morn-n-n-ning.”

“She’ll be-e-e- _eeeee_ —” Foxy reached up and gave his speakers a slap. “—be _dead_ in the morning!” he finished in a snarl and jumped down from the stage, sword raised, bounding up the stairs two and three at a time.

Bonnie spun too fast, falling against the handrail, but grabbing at the sword. It cut into his casing, but he caught it, yanking it out of Foxy’s grip and throwing it with a smack and a clatter at the wall. “Leave her,” he said, shoving his faceless head right up in Foxy’s startled face, “alone.”

“SHE. HAS. NOT. DONE. ANYTHING. WRONG,” said Freddy, as Foxy and Bonnie stared each other down. 

“She will,” Foxy insisted, shouldering Bonnie aside (he went into the rails again and this time, fell over. Fucking leg) to collect his sword. He scraped sparks down the edge running his thumb along the blade, then sheathed it and turned to glare at him as Bonnie struggled to rise. “They always d-d-do, don’t they? Even if all she-e-e does is leave and t-t-t—TELL EACH OTHER TALES O’ THE SEA—tell her friends-s-s we’re still here. Then they’ll c-c-come and sooner or l-l-later…well, h-h-hell, man, have ye l-l-looked in the mirror lately?” Foxy demanded, then executed a double-take as he had a good look at Bonnie himself. “How’d ye do th-th-that?”

Bonnie found himself reluctant to admit just how his lower jaw had been reattached, even though there weren’t many alternatives to the truth. It was right up there on the list of dark rules: No animatronic could fix another. There was a work-around, sort of, in the word ‘another’, in that they could fix themselves, but Bonnie’s hands were too big and his facial parts too small to allow him even to try. He’d been busted for years…and all he’d needed was a screw.

“Did she d-d-do that?” Foxy demanded, now turning to Freddy. “Ye let her g-g-get her hands inside one o’ us? What’s the m-m- _matter_ with ye?”

Freddy’s eyes narrowed, but he did not defend the girl.

“She’s not-t-t like that,” Bonnie insisted, glaring at Freddy.

“Like what?” Foxy challenged. “Like the k-k-kind what breaks into abandoned b-b—BILGERAT—buildings in the dead o’ night? What kind-d-d is she then?”

“I’m watching her-r-r-r.”

“Watching her, m-m-me fuzzy ass,” Foxy scoffed. “Ye were showing her around! I could hear ye all th-th-the way in me bl-bleeding cabin! Carrying on l-li-like a couple of kids, ye were! What was sh-sh-she doing down there in the first-t-t place?”

She’d kissed him. There, in the dark, in the mermaid’s grotto of all places, she’d put her arm around his neck, stood up on her toes, closed her eyes and kissed him. It was the first kiss of his life he didn’t have to bend down for, the first he didn’t have to worry about a snotty nose rubbing up on his muzzle…not that he had one at the moment.

But for a second there, he’d forgotten that. His sensor plates were mostly clogged these days, but when she put her arms around him, by God, he could almost feel it. And when she’d kissed him…he almost felt that too. Catch me, she’d said, and off she ran, like something in a dream, the way Bonnie always imagined dreams were like, just out of reach, leaving nothing but footprints in the dust and echoes of her song in the air. 

“Right-t-t, don’t strain yerself,” Foxy said as Bonnie’s silence dragged on. “Never-r-r mind what she was doing d-d-down there. What were y-y-ye doing down there with-th-th her, that’s the r-r-real question.”

Bonnie turned his face, such as it was, away and dragged himself up on the handrails until he could get his stupid leg under him and find his balance again. “Nothing. She wanted to see the C-Cove, that’s all. I’ll k-k-keep her out from n-now on. All right?” He turned to Freddy, spreading his hands in supplication for a ruling. “I’ll keep-p-p her in—A PUMPKIN SHELL—in the dining room. Okay?”

Freddy grunted, his good grunt, and nodded. “LEAVE. HER,” he ordered. “IT’S. JUST. ONE. NIGHT.”

Foxy rolled his eyes and snapped his eyepatch down over the white one. “Fine,” he grumbled, heading back to his stage. “Keep-p-p her in the dining room and I’ll l-l-leave her be. She comes in here ag-g-gain and I’m tak-k-k-king her head off. Fair w-w-w—WINDS AND A FOLLOWING SEA—fair warning.”

Freddy watched the curtain settle after Foxy slipped through and kept right on watching, his ears twitching to the sound of Foxy’s footsteps stomping up the gangplank. When the sound of the cabin door slamming announced they were alone, he glanced over at Bonnie. 

“What?” Bonnie said defiantly.

“WAS. SHE.” Freddy rolled his eyes, clicking through his sound files for a long minute before giving up and tapping at his own chest. Shirt, he was trying to say. Was she wearing that shirt?

“She was a-a-a-fter she changed into it,” Bonnie said. He debated, decided he really had to tell someone, and added, “Right in f-f-front of me. Every s-s-st-stitch came off, Freddy. I saw her everything. This is the g-g-greatest night of my d-d-damn life.”

Freddy rubbed his brows again, then pointed at Bonnie. “DON’T. TAKE. YOUR EYES. OFF. HER.”

“I won’t. Hell, I won’t-t-t-t take my hands off her, if you th-th-think that’ll help.”

Now it was Freddy’s turn to roll his eyes, but he didn’t bother to answer. Shaking his head, he turned and banged his way back out the door.

Bonnie resumed his long walk, but paused at the silent mouth of the corridor and turned around in the now-empty Cove, to stare across the room at the mouth of the Treasure Cave. He couldn’t smile, circumstances being what they were. Couldn’t even pretend, the way he used to, by dropping his lower jaw so his teeth just barely showed. But he felt a smile, in what passed for his heart rather than on what passed for his face. He smiled and he turned around and left.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING! This book contains strong adult themes, including adult language, drug and alcohol references, sexual themes, violence, and scenes of child abuse. Future episodes will contain graphic depictions of child abduction, violence towards children and adults, graphic gore violence and explicit sexual content. I am not kidding. This book should probably not be read by anyone. 
> 
> Five Nights At Freddy’s is the creation of Scott Cawthon. The characters of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Mangle, Toy Freddy, Toy Bonnie, Toy Chica, Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fredbear, Springtrap, Plushtrap, the Puppet, Balloon Boy, and the Purple Guy, as well as Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, belong to him. Everything else is a product of my own imagination and no similarity to actual events, locations, or people is intended or should be inferred. Do not reproduce, repost or copy any part of this story without my permission. 
> 
> As always, a sincere thank you to all those who took the time to rate and review if you liked it (or even if you didn't like it). If you are interested in my non-fanfiction work, feel free to check out my blog at rleesmith.wordpress.com or look me up on Amazon.

# CHAPTER SIX

Bonnie checked all the doors in the West Hall—both bathrooms, the reading room, even the party room—but the girl wasn’t hiding. Or exploring, or whatever. She was back in the dining room, sitting on one of the tables as she waited for him and watching her feet swing back and forth above the filthy floor. “Hey,” she said as he limped in, but she didn’t look up. 

“Y-Y-You okay?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You r-r-ran out like you were-re-re—”

“I didn’t run.” Now she raised her head and her eyes, although dry, were sparking. “I left, but I didn’t run.” She went back to watching her feet and, a second or two later, to swinging them. “It’s not his fault anyway. He’s not even the same Foxy. I don’t know why I said that stuff.” She thought it over and uttered a low, humorless laugh. “Sure, I do. I’m…I’m not at my best tonight, Bon.”

“Ne- _eeeee_ -either am I. But—” He reached her at last and put a hand on her knee, halting her restless kicking and making her look at him. “—I’m b-b-better than I was.”

She put a hand on his jaw. He thought for a moment she might kiss him again, but she only wiggled it a little, testing the spring. She did smile, though. That was something.

And then she said, “Where’s the janitor’s closet?”

He tried to raise his eyebrows before he remembered he didn’t have any anymore. “What?”

“Your floor is horrible,” she replied, thumbing back at it. “I’m not sleeping on it unless I have something to sleep on. If you have some garbage bags lying around…None of this is getting through, is it? How do I…? Okay, um, some kid made a mess? We need to take the trash out?”

The words didn’t trigger him, but he answered anyway, because the floor was horrible in here. Everywhere, actually, but the main room was the worst, by far. Did they have any garbage bags, though? It was such an improbable thing to steal, but he couldn’t believe it had come through the last however-many-years-it-had-been intact either. Still. Only one way to know.

“Stay here,” he told her and went to see.

He hadn’t taken more than a few steps down the hall before the bluish light of her phone lit behind him. 

“Shhh,” she said when he looked back at her. She was smiling again. “Quiet. Freddy will hear.”

That smile-feeling glowed and spread. ‘I’m in love,’ thought Bonnie. He wasn’t. Even he knew there was no such thing as falling in love in a single night, let alone one hour with a girl he knew damned well he’d never see again, but he wanted to be. Reaching back, he took her hand and led her at his lurching stride down the East Hall, past the signpost and up the back arm toward the security office. 

It was slow going and not just because of Bonnie’s leg. The girl wanted to stop at every door and open it. It didn’t matter if it was the cartoon theater, the craft room or the so-called quiet room, where parents used to take their screaming kids during the day (and _he_ used to take screaming kids at night). But slow didn’t bother Bonnie. It just gave him the chance to scout ahead for Freddy. You never knew where Freddy was at the best of times and he was already in a mood, but he didn’t appear to be in this end of the building, which only meant he’d be here soon. 

At last, they ended up in the arcade, just across from the security room. All the video games were smashed now, but some of the boardwalk games were still in working order (Chica could barely walk these days, but she could kick seven shades of ass at air-hockey), and they all needed investigating. As the girl walked up and down the aisles, Bonnie tensely watched the Puppet’s box behind the ticket redemption counter. He knew it was empty. The Puppet was with _him_ , sealed away where no one could get in or out. Bonnie had passed the arcade a million times without giving that damned box a second thought, and Chica practically lived in here, when she wasn’t hanging out in the kitchen, but somehow just having the girl here, oblivious to what had however briefly denned there, put Bonnie on edge and he did not breathe easy, so to speak, until she came back out.

There was nothing else in this end of the building to distract her, so within a short time, they were finally in the security office. Bonnie went ahead through the opposite door into the employee area, but the girl hung back, exploring. She tried the manager’s office first, but the door was locked, so she moved on to the security desk, opening drawers and picking through papers, before moving on to the cupboard.

“Come on,” said Bonnie, knowing what she’d find if she kept looking. “Come on, d-d-don’t.”

But there it was, the cardboard box labeled Lost-and-Found, and right on top, the Fazbear Band lunchbox with Bonnie’s big stupid face on the front. He didn’t know why he’d used that, except that he didn’t want to use a plastic gift shop bag and he couldn’t bear to just throw the fucking things away or leave them lying where they’d fallen.

Fallen. Yeah, right. Like snow out of the sky or leaves off a tree. Like it was natural, what had happened to him. Like he’d never seen the baseball bat flying at him, heard the sound it made, the crunch, the shattering, or that happy little patter as all the pieces dropped onto the floor. Like he’d never seen his own eye looking up at him from the pool of the bastard’s blood when it was over.

The girl pulled the lunchbox out. Moving it made the pieces inside slide around, and she must have known, she must have, because she looked up at him before she opened it.

She stared for a long time and slowly, slowly sat down on the floor.

“Come on,” said Bonnie again. “Just…Just d-d-don’t look at it. Pl-Please.”

She didn’t answer, didn’t seem to hear. She touched what was inside the lunchbox—forty-eight separate pieces of what used to be him—and then closed it up and sat with it on her lap, her face turned away. She shook her head a few times. She did not speak, made no sound at all.

Out in the hall, Freddy moved heavily by, maybe looking for them. Bonnie shut his eyes off and ducked out of the doorway, waiting until the lights of Freddy’s gaze swept across the security office wall, diffused through the safety glass. The girl was safe enough, sitting where she was, invisible to anyone in the hall, and soon Freddy moved on, grumbling to himself in that wordless way he had when he was good and irritated.

Bonnie stepped back into the doorway and switched his eyelights back on. The girl was on her knees again, putting the lunchbox back with all the reverence of putting bones in a crypt, which, for all intents and purposes, was what she was doing. She pushed a hand across her face, still turned away, then got up and faced him. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say to her if she asked…but she didn’t. She just came over and stared up at him with such a serious expression that he imagined he could feel muscles he didn’t even have and couldn’t remember tightening as he braced himself for an emotional outpouring he had no idea how to handle.

Her eyes were so blue…so clear and so light and just so blue, like they’d been painted on and lit from within. God, a man could fall in love just with those eyes.

“Nope,” she said. “They tried, but they couldn’t do it.”

His ears twitched. 

“It’s still you,” she said.

It hurt. She smiled. That hurt, too.

“And you’re still a sexy beast,” she finished, like it was true and she meant it.

‘I’m in love,’ he thought again as she went past him and into the break room, and no, he still didn’t mean it, but God, he’d never wanted anything so much in the whole of his whatever-the-fuck-this-was that passed as his life. He didn’t know her name and in that moment, it seemed about as necessary as his having a face. Maybe it would make things easier, but it clearly wasn’t necessary. He wanted to be in love. Just for one night.

She wasn’t looking for garbage bags. She had gone to the giant map of Freddyland occupying the fullest wall of the room, the one with every proposed animatronic lined up in its appropriate part of the park, with names and personality traits printed next to each one.

“Lala,” she called back to him, her face screwed up in a cute little sneer. “It’s Lala Loppette on the pisser door. Where’s…? Oh fuck me, Missy _Delicious_?!”

“She c-c-cooks,” he said faintly, still thinking of that smile and the way her eyes had closed right before she’d kissed him. “It’s her whole d-d-deal. Vegetarian c-c-cooking-ing.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. She sure looks like she just finished tossing someone’s salad, all right. I mean, look at her! They do know this is a kid’s park, don’t they?”

Bonnie walked up behind her, but his eyes were on her, not the poster. “It’s still the g-g-grown-ups buying-ing the tickets, isn’t it?”

“You got a point, but still.” Her light moved away from Bunny Patch, scanning the entire park with an expression more appropriate to witnessing a crime scene. Which was pretty damned close, all things considered. “Good God, look at them all. There must be hundreds of them.”

“Eighty-two,” he said. “Eighty-six, if you count us.”

“You’re the only ones I’m counting,” she declared and scrunched up her nose again. “Muskrat Sally, Queen Cleocatra, Amelia Owlheart, Jonathon Livingstone Seagull…Okay, some of those are clever, but oh Jesus, the Catfields and McRoys? Bodeen, Cooter, Loribelle, Roscoe…What hillbilly phone book did they rob for these names? Oh hey, there’s the barnyard. There’s Brewster…and Peggy. Peggy Pigtails.” She glanced back at him. “I had a bet going with myself that her name was Pippa.”

“The b-b-braids,” he said, now looking at the single thick rope of dark hair hanging down her back. He wanted to touch it. Which was silly, because it wasn’t like he could tell he was touching anything these days. He just wanted to see his hand in her hair. “Everybody th-th-thought that.”

“Everybody but the guy that named her. They ought to change her name if they ever go ahead and build this nightmare factory. Or have they already built it?” she asked, squinting at another part of the poster. “It says coming soon on all the signs, but it’s obviously been years and this is the first I’m hearing about Freddyland. Where is it, do you know?” 

“He never b-b-built it. I d-d-don’t think he ever meant to.”

“I guess I should say that’s too bad, but I’m kind of glad, to tell you the truth.” She moved over to inspect a different piece of the poster. “These things are so over-the-top whimsical, they kind of freak me out.” 

“Me, t-t-too.”

She laughed, looked at him, laughed again, then turned away from the poster and started looking through the rest of the room, opening doors and cupboards in search of the cleaning supplies. Bonnie followed her into a likely looking closet, and since he was taller and could see better in the dark, he saw the box of garbage bags on a shelf before she did. He picked it up while she was bent over squinting at bottles of cleanser. The box itself fell apart in his hand, but the roll of bags within was looked okay.

The girl saw him with it and reached for them. He lifted them high overhead and, when she came closer and stood up on her tiptoes in a futile attempt to get them down, put his arm around her and pulled her right up against him.

“Caught you,” he said.

She grinned, then gasped as Freddy’s unmistakable footsteps came stumping up from the security office. Reaching past him, she grabbed the doorknob and pulled the closet door shut.

“I know th-this game,” Bonnie teased, as quietly as he could. “S-Seven minutes-s-s-s in heaven, right-t-t?”

She put her arms around his neck and winked. “Dear Playbunny.”

Freddy’s footsteps, crossing the room, halted. The Toreador March began to play, the sound fluctuating as he turned his head left and right, hunting for them.

“There we w-w-were, trapped in the c-c-closet. She w-w-wanted me. I could tell.” He released her to take that tempting braid and let the length of it pass once through his fingers. He could almost feel it. “But I didn’t-t-t even know her name.”

She giggled, shaking her head in a wondering way, and pushed her braid back over her shoulder to hang down her back. “That’s hilarious. Where are you getting that?”

He walked two fingers up her right arm, climbing the tree inked there before getting a careful grip. All but maybe six of his sensor plates were clogged up and unresponsive these days; it was impossible to know how hard he was holding her, but she didn’t struggle, so it must not be too hard. “Tell me y-y-your name,” he whispered, rubbing his thumb back and forth over the two tattooed birds locked in combat on her shoulder.

She pressed her kissable lips together and lifted her chin, a silent challenge he was too willing to accept.

Keeping the garbage bags raised and out of her reach, Bonnie moved his other hand around to her side where, on most kids anyway, there existed a particularly sensitive tickle spot. By the widening of her eyes, his baby girl was not immune. “Tell me,” he warned, letting his fingers slide up under the edge of her shirt to brush at the curve of her waist.

She shook her head again, her eyes shining.

“Key of B,” he told her, strumming his fingers once. “For ‘Bonnie, no, p-p-please stop, I’m t-t-ticklish.’”

She was. She squirmed, hopping from foot to foot in an attempt to evade him, but there was no escape. This was a closet and Freddy was right outside, so it was either start the squealing or confess.

But she didn’t. She squeezed her eyes shut and hung her mouth open and shook all over with the force of what should have been gales of laughter, but she never made a sound.

Outside, Freddy gave up, switched off his music, and started walking again.

Bonnie stopped tickling, but left his hand where it was, right against her bare belly. He couldn’t feel it, but the idea of his hand on her skin was strong in his mind. He listened, tracking Freddy’s progress, and when he was gone again, Bonnie looked down at her. “Sing it,” he ordered. “The whole th-th-thing. From the b-b-beginning-ing.”

She didn’t question, didn’t show a moment’s confusion. She put her arm around his neck and rested the other on his where he touched her waist and softly sang, “ _It’s a bad, bad world we live in_ …” 

He listened, keeping her in close focus in the dark, memorizing every note as it left her mouth and automatically correcting for pitch and pace and tone.

“… _I’ll be your baby girl tonight if you’ll be my man,_ ” she sang and started swaying just a little, like they were dancing. “ _Oh, I been lost a long, long time and I ain’t been found yet. And you ain’t gonna save me just by taking me to bed. No, you don’t need to know my name. You’ll know me by my scars. But this feels right, so for one night, please just hold me in your arms_.”

“I like it-t-t,” he said, quietly, so as not to interrupt her.

“It’s Mia Rose,” she told him. “I don’t know why I like her so much. Everything she sings sounds like a suicide note.”

“K-K-Keep going.”

“ _Oh, I never been more honest than when I told you lies_ ,” she sang. “ _And I never knew how dead I was, ‘til your touch brought me to life. I’m still leaving in the morning and I’m leaving you behind. But before I go, hold me close and let me make believe you’re mine._

_Oh, you’re not the man I’m looking for, just the lover that I need. And I can’t give you what you want or what you think you see in me. It ain’t love we’re making, just shadows in the dark. But I promise you, before this night is through, I’ll write my name on your heart._ ”

‘This is our song,’ he thought as she hummed her way through an instrumental he was already re-imagining on the guitar, and never mind it was about heartache and tears and love that doesn’t work out. ‘This is our song until I write her a better one.’ 

“ _It’s a bad, bad world_ ,” she sang and he sang it with her, thinking he’d known her less than an hour and he’d never see her again, but her unknown name was on his heart and Bonnie was in love.

# * * *

She made her bed out of garbage bags under one of the few surviving tables in the dining room, to keep the water from seeping in under or the roof from falling on top of her, both of which seemed inevitable, given the conditions of the restaurant. Her blanket was an old sweater from the bottom of her day pack. Her pillow was the pack itself. She’d slept in this same bed in a hundred different places and this abandoned pizza parlor wasn’t even the worst of them.

At the first slacking of the storm, she braved the elements and ran out for one more look at the road and a quick pee. She would have liked another joint, but not if it meant either standing in the rain or toking up in front of Freddy, who was already well beyond his limit when it came to putting up with her shit. Seeing him, the way he stomped around and glared at her from doorways, just daring her to put one more foot over the line, she could almost understand the tremendous fear some kids used to have of him. He sure looked like he could take a few bites out of her. At the same time, his restless patrols up and down the halls, checking on her not just once but again and again, soothed whatever there was left in her that had ever been small and afraid of the storms that came at night. If he was banged up and broken and dirty, well, so what? So was she. He was still Freddy and she was in his house at last, and by God, he was taking care of her.

So it wasn’t fear that kept her awake in her makeshift bed and it wasn’t discomfort or disorientation. In a weird way, it almost seemed to be peace. She’d come home. Not to Mammon, but to _her_ home, her true home, the place that had been home all her life, even when she’d never put but one foot over its threshold before. This was her home and this was her family and if it kept her awake, it was only because she didn’t know what to do with this peace she’d never had.

The rain fell, not as hard but steady. She listened to it, trying to lose herself in its white noise, but found herself straining to hear the hum and clank of the animatronics instead as Freddy or Chica came and went. Bonnie never left. He didn’t talk after she put herself to bed (Did they have nap time at Freddy’s? There was a door marked Quiet Room off the East Hall, so they might have), but he didn’t leave her alone. He stayed and he watched her and as creepy as that was, especially without a face, it was soothing, too.

Safe, dry, home, Ana slept, but she didn’t dream right away. She remembered first.

The memory—not a dream, even if she was sleeping—placed her at the quarry on a sunny day, but the light was diffused, abstract. There was no landscape, apart from the boulder her child-self sprawled against and the red soil beneath her. There was sound—crows screaming. She had been eating ice cream—it covered her shirt-front and matted her hair, sticky and hot and red. She lay, legs open and jeans torn, melted ice cream everywhere, and David knelt beside her, holding her hand. There were tracks of tears on his face, cutting through the dust that always covered both of them after playing at the quarry, but he wasn’t crying now. He was angry. Distantly, she almost heard him say, ‘If someone hurt me, would you hurt them back?’ but no, that wasn’t this memory. In this one, David reached into his back pocket and brought out a gold doubloon, stamped with Foxy’s face. He pressed it into her sticky hand and said, “Take it.”

Her fingers wouldn’t close. Ice cream ran into her eyes. David wiped it away. 

“Take it,” he said again. “It’s from his treasure, his cursed treasure. He’ll know it’s missing by now,” he added, grim and unafraid. “He can’t do anything about it during the day, but at night, things are different. They come alive, I’ve seen them do it. He’ll come alive and he’ll come to get it back. You put it in her room. It’ll call to him and he’ll come for it. Don’t go to sleep. Whatever you do, you stay awake and when you hear the screaming, you get out. Don’t try to sneak through the house. He’ll hear you. Go through the window.”

“I can’t,” little Ana said, but only because her window was so high, not because she didn’t understand.

“Yes, you can. You’re brave and you’re strong.” He wiped at the ice cream on her face some more. How had she gotten so much ice cream on her clear out here? “Go out onto the carport roof and get into the cherry tree, then climb down. You can do it. Then you get your bike and come to my house. If Foxy follows you…” Now his voice faltered and uncertainty touched his resolute gaze, making him young again. No hero. Just a boy. “…Mom and I will keep you safe until morning. In the morning, we’ll give the doubloon back and it’ll be over. Understand?”

She nodded. 

“Don’t go to sleep,” David said again, pressing the doubloon into her hand so that the skull and crossbones side was up and Foxy was hidden. 

The crows screamed and screamed and one of them flew at her, knocking David aside and tangling its sharp talons in her hair, dragging Ana to her feet, and just like that, the memory ended and the dream began.

The quarry vanished, dropping her into the black. The dream started, not with sight, but with sound. The slow, rotted-fur stride of footsteps, accompanied by the muffled grind and whirr of mechanical parts. Freddy, she thought. Freddy was coming for her. 

As soon as she knew who it was, she knew where. Turning, the darkness folded back around her just enough to let her see she was in a Fazbear’s Pizzeria hallway, although the proportions were off. The hall was too tall, too wide—a grown-up hallway seen through a child’s eyes, only she was no child.

There were no bulbs in the ceiling, but there was light all the same, shining down out of nothing onto nothing, illuminating broken tiles, peeling wallpaper and cracked sheetrock stretching out forever into the black from which the echoing, sinister sound of footsteps came as Freddy dragged himself hungrily toward her. Eventually, she could see the greater blackness of his body against the indistinct dark at the end of the hall, the glint of reflected light on his plastic eyes and metal teeth. She waited for him, knowing she could run and maybe even get away, but she didn’t. It was Freddy and he loved her. Sometimes love came with teeth.

But it was not a seven-foot animatronic bear that stepped out into the light. It was David, still eleven. He was wearing a paper Freddy-mask that covered the top half of his face, but it was David just the same. It was Halloween, maybe. His Batman shirt was torn and painted around the neck and chest with fake blood. He smiled and opened his mouth as if to speak, but although his mouth moved like words, all he could make was Freddy’s hearty hey-kids laugh. Freddy’s was the shadow he cast on the floor before him, reaching out for her with clawed hands.

She went to him, dismayed to see that she was not shrinking down to meet him as a child of ten. She was still grown, still lost in this oversized ruin of a body. He had to hug her around her waist and press his paper mask against her awkward grown-up boobs, but it was David. She could feel his metal fingers digging at her back, hear his gears turning, smell his blood. David.

When he took her hand, she followed him down the dark hall and into the dining room. The tables were laid out for a birthday, all empty chairs and party hats. The curtain rose as David led her to the stage, revealing the false backdrop of another hallway, the one leading from Aunt Easter’s front door to the kitchen, but all the angles were wrong. The stairs zigged crazily up and out of frame. The window had too many corners; the archway, not enough. The rolltop desk where Aunt Easter kept her keys and paid her bills, David’s winter jacket hanging on the wall, the rug two small children could slide on all the way to the kitchen with a good running start—all painted on. The only prop separate from the backdrop was the grandfather clock. She could see the pendulum moving through the glass, hear the ticking of its works. It loomed, its face like a staring eye, seeing her. Wanting her. Hungry.

David climbed onto the stage without hesitation and went to the clock, opening the narrow door and slipping inside. It had always been his favorite hiding place when circumstances forced them to play indoors, at least until the clock got fixed and it became off-limits. When was that? Odd…she could remember playing in the clock when it was broken and remember watching Aunt Easter wind it after it got fixed, but the space in-between was dark. A man had fixed it. A man she almost remembered. She could feel the memory scratching at the inside of her skull, stirring up fragments without context: He had glasses. He had longish hair, tied back, blonde. He had stubble; she could see her hand reaching up to rub at his cheek while he smiled at her. And she could see him in this hallway, tinkering away at the gears and springs, humming as he fixed it. _This was my father’s favorite song_ , he said somewhere in that memory. _It’s about death_.

David went into the clock and closed the door. He did not come out again.

Ana climbed onto the stage. The curtain dropped behind her, soft as a whisper, trapping her in this mockery of the past. The clock grew bigger with every step she took toward it, inventing new dimensions to fill so it could tower over her while she remained stubbornly adult. She opened it, not sure what she was expecting, but it was just a clock. An empty clock. She could touch the walls, feel them solid beneath her fingers…but sticky.

“David?” 

Her answer was another of those Freddy-laughs, far away.

She stepped inside, thinking now it would stretch out into a tunnel, leading her from one nightmare to another, and at first, it seemed to, but with every step she took, the clock grew smaller, until she was trapped between its walls in confines almost too tight to breathe. She tried to back up, but that only made the squeeze worse. The sound of the clock’s gears was deafening. She struggled, her arms and legs slipping along the sticky inner walls, groping for just an inch here, an inch there, until she could twist herself all the way around, and it wasn’t a clock at all, if it had ever been one. It wasn’t a clock and it wasn’t a tunnel, but one of those torture things with nails on the inside. They grew out of the walls, first pressing and then piercing her, holding her in place as he stepped into view before her, the man she could almost remember.

“Help me,” she tried to say, but it was lost in the ticking of the clock. “Help me, let me out!”

“You can come out when you’re ready to join the family,” he told her and shut the door.

She could see it swing toward her, all red-smeared glass studded through with nails, and then they were stabbing into her—her arms and legs, her belly, her breasts, her cheeks, her lips, her open eyes.

“This was my father’s favorite song,” she heard him say through her screams. “It’s my son’s now, too.”

And Freddy laughed.

# * * *

The storm was over when Ana woke in the dark, although she could still hear the rain falling on the roof and through it, onto the puddles on the floor. She rolled over, feeling at the plastic beneath her and the table above, anchoring herself to whatever reality this was, until she remembered where she was and why.

In the darkness, a voice, stuttering and metallic: “That was e-e-either a really bad dream or a re- _eeeee_ -lly good-d-d one.”

Bonnie.

She opened her eyes and there he was, slumped against the wall at the edge of the stage with his ‘good’ leg bent so his arm could rest on it and his ‘bad’ one stiff before him. She could see his guitar better, since that was what he was looking at, and the light from his cameras was the only light she had. It had no strings; he was playing it anyway, his defurred fingers moving up and down the cracked neck while he strummed on nothing. 

She watched him for a while, hearing nothing but the rain, thinking there had been music to go with those movements once and she’d never know what it was. That was all right, although it was sad, but when the sister-thought came to her that David had probably heard it and could even sing along, she broke and began to cry.

She made very little noise, just the shuddering of her breath, but he must have been keyed to respond to it, because Bonnie looked up at once, his eyeless, faceless gaze focused on her. “Oh, h-h—HI THERE!—hey now,” he said. “What’s w-w-wrong?”

She shut her eyes, but the tears kept coming, pouring out of her like blood from a wound, the way they always did with this particular wound, the one that had never closed. She curled up small on the damp plastic, leaking in silence, and tried to go back to sleep.

“Hey?” He put his guitar aside and tried to stand, but his bad leg wasn’t cooperating. “You a-a-awake? God-d-d-damn knee…You oka-a-ay? T-T-Talk to me, baby girl. HEY FREDDY! I NEED HELP!”

Footsteps, but not Bonnie’s. They came from the hall, not the stage. Slow. Heavy. The same scrape-and-thud that had followed her into her dreams and out of them again. Freddy. But it was David she saw behind her eyes. David in a torn shirt and a paper mask, eternally eleven. David, who’d tried to save her with a prize token from a pizza parlor. 

All these years…all these years, she’d forgotten. She hadn’t thought of that stupid doubloon in years, but now here she was, and it all came flooding back. She remembered slipping the coin under her mother’s mattress and hiding under her covers that night, her little heart pounding and her breath like knives in her chest, waiting to hear the roar of that voice she’d heard so many times on Aunt Easter’s tapes, fearing the dark and fearing the jump from the carport roof into the high, slippery branch of the cherry tree, but straining—oh God, please—straining to hear those screams.

It never happened. He never came. But the next day, David was gone. 

It wasn’t a doubloon, cursed or otherwise, just a gold-painted toy. It couldn’t have saved her, no more than it had doomed him. And all of this was true, but still some part of her would always wonder…if he’d never done it, if he’d never tried to save her, if he’d just let her mother kill her…maybe he’d be here today. He’d have a wife and kids who loved him. He’d have a real home and not just a string of beds where he sometimes slept. He’d have a job that didn’t involve building and burying meth labs. He’d have a briefcase and not a fifty-year-old duffel bag stuffed with spare clothes, condoms and pot. He’d have a life and he’d have done so much more with it. 

Ana put her hands up to her face and silently wept into her shaking palms.

“Knee’s locked-d-d up again,” Bonnie was saying. “I th-th-think she’s c-c-crying. Go s-s-s—SEE WHAT I MEAN?—see if she’s ok-k-kay.”

Freddy grunted and in that one short, wordless sound was whole essays of why-the-hell-should-I, but his heavy, zombie footsteps approached the table under which Ana lay. She rolled over at once, away from him, and curled up small under her makeshift blanket. The plastic crinkled with the force of her sobs, but she herself never made a sound.

She heard a click, very loud, and Freddy said, “AWW, WHAT’S WRONG?” The last word broke off on a harsh tone. There were more clicks. Freddy came one step closer and stopped again. “LET’S GO F-F-FIND YOUR M-M-MOM. LET’S G-GO—GO—GO FIND-D-D-D YOUR MOM.”

Ana shook her head and drew herself into a tighter ball.

“LET’S G-GO FIND,” Freddy urged, clicking over and over beneath his coaxing, good-natured growl. “LET’S GO. LET’S G-G-G-GO FIND-D-D. MOM. LET’S.”

Then, quiet. Freddy stood there, clicking every few seconds as he worked his way through some internal list of what to do with a crying child. She imagined him shuffling off into the dark, circling the building forever as he hunted for a parent she didn’t even have anymore and who certainly wouldn’t comfort her even if she did.

But no. His footsteps weren’t retreating, but coming closer. The table shuddered when he put his hand on it. His servos whined as he knelt down. Too late, Ana shifted onto her hands and knees and tried to crawl away, but he reached in and caught her, pulling her squirming and struggling out from the dark.

Into his arms.

She was a child, a crying child, and she didn’t have a mom to find. What else could he do? She tried to get away from him, but it was like fighting a wall, so Ana went limp, her eyes shut tight and tears spilling out anyway, and let Freddy hold her. He said nothing. Neither did she. Every now and then, he patted or rubbed at her back, but that was all. He stank of mold and plastic and loss. 

“Have you g-g-got her?” Bonnie asked, managing to gain his feet although he didn’t seem too sure of his balance. His leg dragged on his first attempt; he balled his fist and gave it a smack, knocking something loose with a muffled _sprong_. His next step was better. “Is sh-she awake?”

Freddy leaned back a little to look at her. Their eyes met—his, palely glowing and hers, still dripping tears. “YES.”

Bonnie came a little closer. “Is sh-she okay?”

Freddy’s head tipped to one side. She could hear servos humming as he studied her. “NO.”

Ana shut her eyes again and turned her face toward what was left of the fuzz on Freddy’s chest. She didn’t want to be awake yet. It was late. She could look at her phone and know that for sure, but she didn’t need it. A part of her was still inside that grandfather clock; she knew the hour.

“NO. SHE’S. NOT. OKAY.” He rubbed her back some more. “BUT. SHE’S. SAFE,” he said, now just to her, even if he was still pretending to be talking to Bonnie, pretending he believed her silence meant she wasn’t really here. “NOTHING. CAN. HURT. HER. I’M HERE. YOU’RE HERE.”

“HI THERE,” Chica said shyly from the kitchen door. “GIRLS CAN BE BRAVE, TOO.”

“CHICA. IS. HERE,” agreed Freddy. “NOTHING. CAN. GET. IN.” He glanced up as some stray animal or another scuttled through the ventilation shaft on the ceiling. “OR. OUT.” His gears ground louder as he shifted to place Ana back in her sorry bed. He kept one hand on her as she rolled onto her side away from him and curled up small, then took it back and heaved himself up onto his feet. “SHE’S. SAFE,” he said again. “LEAVE. HER. ALONE. AND. LET. HER. SLEEP.”

And Ana did, just that easy, like it was all she needed to know.


	7. Chapter 7

# CHAPTER SEVEN

Ana had always been a heavy sleeper, even when pot wasn’t involved, let alone little pink pills. When she closed her eyes on Freddy in the night, she did not open them again until morning, which she knew because she could see. Just enough sunlight found a way through the boarded-up foyer and past the barricade at the cashier’s station to show her the entire dining room, all the rot and ruin, everything broken, everything decayed, right up to the three animatronics on stage.

On stage?

Ana pushed herself up on her elbow, garbage bags crinkling beneath her as she shifted, and leaned out from under the table just like that slight change of angle would somehow alter the view. But no, there they were. Bonnie on the left with his cracked, stringless guitar in his hands; Chica on the right, arms up and fingers splayed over empty space where her keyboard ought to be; Freddy in the middle, microphone in hand and raised to his mouth. All three had their eyes closed and their heads tipped forward, as if sleeping on their feet. In the grey, uneven light, with water from the leaking roof dripping down their bodies and dirt showing black in every crease and crack, they looked like they’d been standing there for years.

Had they?

No. The empty stage had been the first thing she’d seen when she broke in. She’d been high, but not that high. They’d been out and about, all three of them, and Bonnie…Bonnie especially.

Had she really kissed him? Probably. Spider and all. She’d been high, but even stone-cold sober as she was this morning, she’d be happy to kiss him again.

But it was eerie, seeing him like this. Motionless. Silent. Like a…well, like an inanimate object.

“Bonnie?” Ana ventured.

No response. Not so much as a twitch.

“Bonnie? My man?”

Nothing.

Ana felt at her pocket and yes, there were a handful of screws. And there, her screwdriver, lying next to her day pack. She had no doubt if she looked in the kitchen, she’d see that big steel spoon on the prep counter where she’d left it after shaping the end of the broken spring she’d used to rig Bonnie’s jaw into place. 

And yet, there they were. Wind-up toys no one had wound up, not for years. Looking around the dining room, it was hard to believe that, even as high as she’d apparently been, she ever could have thought they’d still be in any kind of working order.

It was too early to think about it. Groaning, Ana dropped back atop her day pack and shut her eyes. Another hour’s sleep and she’d try again to sort out last night’s events. But for right now, nothing mattered more than—

“ _Narwhals, narwhals, swimming in the ocean, causing a commotion, cuz they are so awesome!_ ”

Ana pried her eyes open and pinched her brows together. “The fuck?”

But she heard it again, so close it may as well be emanating from her own head: “ _Narwhals, narwhals, swimming in the ocean, causing a commotion, cuz they are so awesome!_ ”

Not in her head. Under it. From her pack, which she was using as a pillow. 

Ana struggled the flaps open and groped inside until her fingers found the familiar shape of her phone. Rider. At some point during her last night in California, she’d changed Rider’s ringtone to the narwhal song. Because, she supposed, he was so awesome. And she’d been high.

She accepted the call, put it on speaker so she wouldn’t have to find her ear, and let her hand drop with a smack to the wet floor. “Morning,” she said.

Rider’s voice grated out through the phone into the empty room like the echoing voice of God Himself: “Woman, you better be dying in a motherfucking ditch somewhere, because if you ain’t, you will be when I get my fucking hands on you.”

On stage, Freddy opened his eyes.

Startled, Ana sat all the way up and as a consequence, whacked her head on the table. By the time she’d scooted out from underneath it and could get another look, the animatronic’s eyes were shut again. If they’d ever opened.

“—looked me right in the eye and promised you would call when you got there and what do you do? You think I got a habit of letting my ponies lie to me, is that what you think? You think just because you’re in fucking Mormon country, I won’t roll out there and find you? There ain’t no one nowhere I can’t find if I want to and no fucking hole too deep I won’t dig it out and put a lying bitch in it!”

“Calm your tits, Rider,” Ana said crossly, rolling onto her knees and then to her feet. She picked her way across the floor, squinting up at Freddy’s shadowed face, silently daring him to move. He did not. “I told you I’d text or something when I got to the house and the only reason I never did it is because I’m not there yet.”

Rider gave that a moment’s consideration and said, somewhat coolly but at least leaning towards reason, “Car break down?”

“No, it just took longer than I expected to do the driving. Hell, it took four hours just to get through the pass. It’s still winter in the mountains, you know.”

“I smell horseshit. What route did you take?”

“I-5 to I-80 and over.” Ana reached out and touched Freddy’s knee. Whatever brittle plastic fuzz they’d used to put fur on him came off on her finger in a gritty brown-black sludge and left a denuded stripe on his casing, but he did nothing.

“I-80? Woman, I’m looking at Mammon right this instant and 80 don’t go anywhere near it.”

“I didn’t go to Mammon.”

“You said the house—”

“The house is in Mammon,” she said. “The debt collecting assholes were in Salt Lake City. I told you this.”

“Salt Lake…?” A pause, during which Rider presumably adjusted his map. “You had to go all the fucking way up there just to—”

“Just to come all the way back down. Yeah. Anyway, I didn’t even talk to the guy until yesterday morning and dealing with him took all day, plus the drive down, and then talking to the people down here, and then it rained like a mad bastard and flooded out the road.” 

“There you go again, lying to me. You get a lot of flash floods in fucking _Utah?_ ”

“More than you’d think.” Ana turned her back on Freddy and went to the door that opened on the windowed West Hall, trying to see something of the outside world through the dirty glass and broken boards. “The ground out here is all hardpan. It rains and the water can’t soak in, so it washes out in sheets toward the lowest point, which just happens to be an old quarry, presently hundreds of feet deep in toxic sludge. I was literally five minutes away from the house and couldn’t get home. I mean, maybe I could have, but it was definitely one of those ‘On the one hand, I’m pretty sure I can make it, but on the other hand, if I’m wrong, I’m going to die horribly’ situations.”

“I’m talking to you, so I assume you finally unlocked your common sense achievement and found a hotel.”

“Couldn’t get to the hotel either.” Ana went into the gift shop next and leaned out through the broken window. The foyer floor was covered with a fresh layer of that greyish-red mud unique to Mammon’s mountains. It was still dark toward the barricade, where it was deepest, but had dried and cracked at the edges. A promising omen of what awaited her on the road. “Fortunately, I met up with some old friends for the first time and they let me crash at their place.”

“Jesus tap-dancing Christ, girl. You don’t see someone for twenty years and you just follow her the fuck home?”

“Them,” said Ana, prying a loose chunk of glass out of the window and tossing it onto the mud in the foyer. It bounced on the dry end and got mired in the wet. She turned away and went back into the dining room, heading first for her day pack under the table, but drawn instead back to the stage. She stopped in front of Bonnie, staring up into his faceless face, and said, “I followed _them_ home. Although, strictly speaking, I didn’t do that either. I broke into their house.”

“Say that again? I couldn’t hear you over the sound of the stupid.”

“They were cool about it.”

“You keep saying that word. They. How many we talking about?”

“Three. Wait, four,” she amended, curling her lip at the thought of Foxy, but more from embarrassment than anything. “But he stayed in his room the whole night, so it’s fine.”

“ _He?_ You crashed with a bunch of _guys_ you ain’t seen for twenty years?”

“One of them’s a girl.”

“One of them.” The phone brought her the meaty smacking sound of Rider clapping a hand to his shaved head. “You stayed straight at least, right?”

Ana laughed.

“Can you name one thing you could have done to make that situation worse? I mean, can you even?”

“I hooked up with one of them.”

“You what? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“You don’t want to ask me that unless you’re ready for me to point out how many of the items on that list are your fault.”

Although plainly still annoyed, Rider huffed out a laugh. “Fair point. You didn’t really, though. Hook up with the guy whose house you broke into?”

“I totally did.”

“Girl, I’m feeling like I don’t even know you.”

“Yeah, yeah, save your lecture, ‘cause I’m not sorry. I couldn’t help it. He was the perfect guy. Tall. Strong. Great sense of humor. Plays guitar in a band.” She reached out, just able to brush her fingertips along the cracked casing of his leg, the one that dragged when he walked. If he walked. “A little damaged, but handsome as hell. Just a sexy beast. I couldn’t resist.”

Bonnie did not move. None of them did.

“Yeah? And how’d that work out for you?”

“Woke up alone on a dirty floor in a cold puddle on a bed made of garbage bags.”

“Ouch.” A pause. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I’m fine.” Ana leaned in, searching the dark cameras of Bonnie’s ‘eyes’ and finding nothing, not even her own reflection. With a sigh, she dropped her arm and turned away. “Look, my battery is on its last gasp, so consider this your I’m-alive phone call.”

“And when am I gonna hear from you again?”

“Fifth of Never, mid-afternoon,” Ana replied, wandering over to the door to the West Hall again. “Where the hell is this attitude coming from? I must have left you a hundred times. Since when do I need constant checking up on?”

“I just thought it might be nice to know when or if I’m ever going to see you again.”

“I can’t even begin to answer that until I’ve seen the house.” With a last glance toward the stage and the three animatronics still frozen in their places and waiting to perform, Ana pulled the groaning door as far open as it would go and squeezed through into the hall. “So far, all I’ve seen are a few photos, and I have to tell you, from what I’ve seen in those, I’m going to need every minute of the ninety days I’ve been given to pass an inspection before the city has the place condemned.”

“No shit. They tell you that before or after you bought the place?”

“What do you think?” 

“I think you should have told me the son of a bitch’s name. In my experience, folks is a lot less inclined to rook someone over like that after they’ve gone ass to mouth with the barrel of a gun.”

“Live and learn, right?”

“So how deep are you?”

“Forty-two to buy the house, another twelve owing on penalties and shit now that it’s mine, plus inspection costs in ninety days, not to mention what it’ll take to do the repairs, if it can even be repaired. I don’t know, Rider,” sighed Ana, picking her way down the hall toward Tux, who was just as she remembered leaving him: draped all over in last night’s clothes. “That house holds the only good memories I have of family or friends or anything else about this toilet of a town, but I just don’t know. I mean, best case scenario here—I fix the place up, get on the city’s good side and then what? Move in? This is not where I want to spend the rest of my life. Sell it? The debt guy seemed pretty damn confident I’d never turn a profit and this is what he does for a living.”

“At what point do you just cut your losses and come home?”

“That’s what I’m wondering.” Ana glanced at the bathroom doors as she passed them. Bonnie on the Boys. Lala on the Girls. Lala Loppette, if she was remembering that right. But how could she be unless Bonnie had been with her in the break room, looking at the poster with her? She could remember everything so clearly. How could she have been so high that she just…just _hallucinated_ a giant purple bunny following her around all night? And here was the corridor to Pirate Cove. The daylight streaming in through the boarded windows was not enough to reach the end of the corridor, but she was dead sure if she went in, she’d find the front half of a pirate ship sticking out of the wall and, beyond it, a foam cave with a maze leading to a wind-up mermaid’s hidden grotto. 

And here, here was the side door she’d come through last night. Bonnie may not have opened it the way she remembered, but someone had. The chain that had secured it lay coiled around Tux’s plastic feet, the broken link not cut but twisted and snapped. 

“You still there?”

“Yeah,” Ana said uncertainly, nudging at that chain with her foot. The broken ends of the rusted link were still shiny. A fresh break. “Yeah, I’m here, but I really do have to get going. Look, as soon as I have some idea how long all this is going to take, I’ll call you again, okay? Just don’t expect daily check-ins, because that’s not happening.”

Rider gave her one of his non-committal grunts (with last night’s non-events still heavy in her thoughts, it reminded her of Freddy). “You know, I could buy the place from you. Get you your money back and flip it like we always do. Hell, I don’t care if I have to take a loss on the house. I’ll turn a profit anyway.”

“You’re not turning my aunt’s house into a meth lab, Rider.”

“That ain’t all I do, you know.”

“Or a pot farm or a…whatever the fuck you’re thinking, the answer is no! Now I need to get out of here, pour some coffee in me and see just how bad things are at the house. You talked to me, I’m alive, now kindly fuck off, please. I’ve got a lot to do today.”

“Okay, okay. Just putting the offer out there. Do what you want with it. You need anything, you know how to reach me.”

He hung up before she could. Ana took a minute to adjust his contact info and set the ringtone back to the standard warble. The narwhal song was going to be creeping back on her for days, she just knew it. And _that_ was what she did when she was high—she got tattoos and played with her phone, and most importantly, she either remembered all the stupid shit she did or she couldn’t remember anything at all. She did not and never had spun fantasy-time adventurers out of thin air and slapped them down over the blank spots.

Still, hadn’t Rider said something about the pills being a new formula? She thought the pink ones were just regular old Lexotan and it was the blue capsules she had to go easy on, but maybe the pink ones were the new stuff and the blues were just Adderall? It probably hadn’t helped that she’d taken two of them and washed it down with pot. Extenuating circumstances and all that, but in the light of day, she knew it hadn’t been smart.

Oh well. Ana put the phone in her pocket and pushed the door open as far as it would go, crawling under the loosened boards with a little effort and out into the morning air. If she thought her first breath would be an improvement on the mildewing rot inside Freddy’s, she was soon corrected. The wind was coming in from the quarry, like breathing in a fart directly from the devil’s ass. Even twenty years ago, that stink had been beyond rank, and it had only grown stronger with time. And yet, someone somewhere had thought this was the perfect place to put a restaurant. One with an outdoor playground, no less. That was even more mind-boggling when she was sober than it had been last night.

Ana walked out to the edge of the lot and down the steep slope to the road, hidden now beneath a fresh shell of red mud streaked with grey silt. A few thick branches and smallish boulders washed off the mountainside during the storm still stood where they had mired. No tire-tracks cut across the mud to prove it was traversable, but she was able to kick through to the asphalt and it looked to be only four or five inches deep. Wet, that could still present a problem and she supposed the thing to do would be to wait a few hours for the mud to firm up, but she didn’t want to wait and anyway, what if it started raining again? 

Fuck it, she had four-wheel drive. She’d take it slow and she’d be fine. She only had to mush through it another half-mile or so and she’d be up and out of the mess, winding her way through the forested foothills to Aunt Easter’s house, and a whole new mess.

Ana made her way back up the incline (after a quick stop at the thickest stand of trees and bushes bordering the lot, which, being comprised of sandbrush and Joshua trees, was not thick enough to conceal her lily-white ass; fortunately, the roads remained deserted) and back in through the side door. It was much easier getting in this way than to do battle with the barricade and sliding doors of the main entrance, even more so now that it was day and she was more or less sober, but she still managed to snag her shirt on the underside of the loose boards. She heard it tear and swore even before she felt the burn of pain and itch of blood on her back. She wasn’t overly fond of the shirt—plain grey, with F U Athletics Dept stenciled in navy blue on the front—but she didn’t have so many she could afford to lose one.

Once inside, she anchored herself to Tux with an arm around his neck, trying to determine whether the damage was worth buying a needle and thread, since her meager supply of sewing materials had not been deemed necessary to move with, and it was with all her concentration diverted and her balance in question, that she suddenly heard singing in the dining room.

The sound was so unexpected that, even though she recognized Freddy’s voice—hell, she recognized the song—she attempted to leap away anyway, to the effect that she crashed up hard against Tux’s angular body and bounced off it into the wall. 

Over the sound of her heart pounding on her eardrums, Freddy sang on, his big-bear voice growling but good-natured: “ _GOOD MORNING, GOOD MORNING, GOOD MORNING TO YOU! OUR DAY IS BEGINNING, THERE’S SO MUCH TO DO!_ ”

“ _WE’RE ALL IN OUR PLACES,_ ” sang Bonnie.

Chica chimed in, “ _WITH CLEAN HANDS AND FACES! OH, GOOD MORNING!_ ”

“ _GOOD MORNING!_ ”

“ _GOOD MORNING!_ ” sang Freddy and they all finished together: “ _GOOD MORNING TO YOU!_ ”

Ana pushed herself off the wall and took a step forward, her head cocked and ears straining. She could hear Freddy’s voice, no longer singing, but rising and falling in familiar rhythm as he went through the second part of his morning spiel—yadda yadda yadda, welcome to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, it’s great to see you, looking at all your smiling faces reminds me of the time, blah blah, bad joke, blah.

But the animatronics didn’t work anymore. The building was closed, abandoned. They couldn’t possibly still be working.

They’d been working last night. 

That was her imagination. 

“I don’t have that much imagination,” Ana whispered, taking another step toward the sound of Freddy’s monologue.

True, under normal circumstances, but she’d been high. She’d seen the animatronics frozen on stage and the little pink pills had done the rest.

She was stone sober now, though.

‘Flashback,’ her rational mind insisted.

“From Lexotan? Give me a fucking break.” Having an argument, even if it was just with herself, made her feel more secure. She took a third step and might have taken a fourth and fifth and on all the way down the hall to see with her own eyes either the Fazbear Band in their opening hour routine or frozen and silent on stage once more, when out from the black pit that was Pirate Cove, she heard, “AHOY MATEYS!”

She froze, not knowing which way to run or even really why she should, and after a few seconds, she heard him again:

“AYE, IT’S ME, YER OLD SHIPMATE, CAPTAIN FOX. YAR, IT DOES AN OLD SALT GOOD TO SEE ALL YER WEE FACES SO BRIGHT AND EARLY. YE’LL MAKE FINE PIRATES, THE LOT O’ YE.” He paused, as if listening to some reply unheard by Ana, then said, “OF COURSE THEY’RE GOING TO BE PIRATES! JUST LOOK AT ‘EM!” Another pause. “WHAT DO YE MEAN, TOO SOON TO TELL? I ALWAYS KNEW I’D BE A PIRATE, EVER SINCE I WERE A PUP! AND AS SOON AS I STARTED, YE COULD SAY I WERE HOOKED!”

During the lengthy pause that followed this punchline, Ana moved out of the hall and into the short corridor that led to Pirate Cove. What little light worked through the boards did not follow her and within a few cautious steps, she was enclosed by the black, feeling her way along the wall until she came to the corner. She could feel the openness of the room beyond, its breeze like breath on her face, but she could see nothing at all. 

“AIN’T THAT THE TRUTH,” Foxy said suddenly. The curious acoustics of this room bounced his disembodied voice off the walls, making it seem as though he were simultaneously behind her, in front of her, across the room and right against her ear. “WHEN I WERE FIRST TRAINING UP TO BE A PIRATE, IT WERE SERIOUS BUSINESS. I HAD TO SWAB THE DECKS, HOIST THE SAILS, AND WALK THE PLANK EVERY DAY.” Another pause. Who was he supposed to be talking to? Ana couldn’t remember Foxy’s act ever including a straightman, but she was obviously missing half of his routine. “WELL, IT WERE A SMALL SHIP. WE COULDN’T AFFORD A DOG.” 

After a short mental debate, she fished out her phone and tapped on its flashlight app, aiming the screen down into the auditorium surrounding the stage. In the few seconds before her battery failed and threw her back into the black, she could see that not only was Foxy performing to empty seats in an empty room, but he was doing it from behind the curtain. 

“OH AYE, ANYONE CAN BE A PIRATE THESE DAYS, AS LONG AS YE PAY THE UNION FEES,” he was saying. 

“What kind of fee?” Ana guessed, just mouthing the words with a ghost of breath beneath them, but her whisper echoed in the empty auditorium.

And he answered, “WHY, AN ARM AND A LEG, O’ COURSE.” 

Shivering, Ana retreated to the hall and the light. She huddled by Tux, gripping at his head and rubbing compulsively at the place where his ear used to be, although she was scarcely aware of him and would not have chosen one of the fake new faces of Freddy’s to comfort her if she’d thought about it. She could still hear Foxy telling his jokes, as well as Freddy down in the dining room, now singing The Inchworm Song, with Bonnie and Chica on backup math-vocals. 

Was Brewster strumming on his banjo in the foyer? Were Millie, Tillie and Hillie doing the can-can in their shadowbox by the south bathrooms? Somehow, she thought not. No, Peggy wasn’t waving and Swampy wasn’t stealing nips of moonshine from his jug and tapping his tail along with the beat, and wherever and whatever the last two things were, they were still and silent. The power was out; they were just machines.

What did that make Freddy and the others, then?

Machines. Just…slower to power down.

By years.

Hardly aware that she had begun walking, Ana found herself at the door to the dining room. Through the film of dirt and black lacy blooms of mold, she could see the table with her day pack underneath it, but of the stage itself, she could catch occasional glimpses of Freddy’s arm as he gestured out at the otherwise empty room. As she watched, his song ended. He went through another of his MC monologues, fielding interruptions now and then from silent Swampy, and ending by asking the empty room to give Bonnie a big hand as he invited him to step up and play some songs. From this angle, Ana could see nothing but his hand waving to keep applause only he could hear coming…

…and then his arm dropped. He moved aside as Bonnie stepped into the center stage position, but did not clear the stage, as Ana knew damned well he should and always had in the tapes she’d seen. Instead, he leaned out over the foot of the stage and, as Bonnie’s fingers moved over the broken strings of his guitar, Freddy’s head swept slowly left to right. 

“ANY REQUESTS?” Bonnie asked the empty room and after a suitable pause, said, “IN THAT CASE, LET’S START OFF WITH ONE OF MY FAVORITE SONGS! SING ALONG IF YOU KNOW THE WORDS! _OVER IN THE MEADOW IN THE SAND IN THE SUN, LIVED AN OLD MOTHER FROGGIE AND HER LITTLE FROGGIE ONE. WINK!’ SAID THE MOTHER._ ”

“‘ _WE WINK,’ SAID THE ONE!_ ” Chica replied and joined Bonnie on the last line, “ _AND THEY WINKED ALL DAY IN THE SAND IN THE SUN!_ ”

“SOUNDS LIKE AN EXCITING TIME, HUH, KIDS?” Bonnie interjected dryly. “JUST A’SITTING AND A’WINKING ALL DAY. YUP, THAT’S THE LIFE. YEE HAW. _OVER IN THE MEADOW WHERE THE STREAM RUNS BLUE_ —”

Freddy glanced back at them, then turned back to the dining room. His eyes lit up, shining like flashlights as he searched the shadows under the table, lingering on her pack before moving on to the south corridor and the doorway to the kitchen.

“— _AND THEY SWAM ALL DAY WHERE THE STREAM RUNS BLUE!_ NOW THAT’S MORE LIKE IT. I COULD SWIM ALL DAY IF I HAD THE CHANCE, TOO,” Bonnie interjected. “WHAT ABOUT YOU, CHICA?”

“WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE, A DUCK?”

“YEAH, A LITTLE.” Pause for laughter and then straight back into the song: “ _OVER IN THE MEADOW IN A HOLE IN A TREE, LIVED AN OLD MOTHER BLUEBIRD_ —”

Freddy finally got off the stage and started across the room, but he did it in a weird way, taking a few steps at a time and stopping to look around. Looking for kids to entertain, Ana told herself, but she didn’t believe it even when she thought it and didn’t believe it any better when he reached the table across the room and picked up her day pack. 

He was looking for her.

Ana pushed the door open.

Freddy turned at once.

They stared at each other. It shouldn’t have felt like that. It should have felt like…like staring at a doll. It didn’t. She looked at Freddy; he looked at her. In the meadow, the mother turtle and her little turtles four dug all day in the mud by the shore.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Freddy looked at her pack in his hands and put it down on the table. “THE RESTAURANT IS CLOSED. IT’S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE.”

Ana looked at the stage where Bonnie and Chica sure seemed to think they had an audience as they counted their way through the meadow’s resident wildlife, trading quips back and forth between verses. Their movements were not smooth as they performed. Bonnie in particular twitched and shuddered as he ‘played’ his guitar, especially whenever he turned to the right. She thought at first these spasms were connected in some way with her, that seeing her there was somehow provoking him to glitch out, but the longer she watched, the more he twitched, whether he was looking at her or not.

And his jaw was already loose, she saw. With every hard jerk that shook through him, it flopped wildly, tapping at his chest on the worst shudders. Whether because of this or just another glitch in his mechanisms, he had begun to stutter as he sang, and by the time he reached the bit about the old mother lizard and her little lizards eight, Chica was ahead of him by several words. This made their exchange mid-verse difficult to follow, with Chica responding to dry banter Bonnie hadn’t even made yet. 

But if it was hard to hear, it was downright painful to watch. Bonnie seemed to be aware of the growing schism in their routine; at least, his glitches became more and more pronounced, which made the gulf widen that much faster. Keeping one eye on Freddy (who had begun to circle around and behind her in a not-at-all predatory or ominous fashion), Ana moved closer to him.

“PLEASE KEEP CLEAR OF THE STAGE,” said Freddy behind her. “FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S SAFETY, PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO PULL ON THE ANIMATRONICS.”

Bonnie’s head turned hard, shuddering as it stopped. He looked down at her, right at her, all the exposed rods and springs that worked his muzzle flapping around as he sang on about the mothers in the meadow and their numerous offspring, in a happier time and place where everyone knew their place in the world and did just what they were made to do all day in the sun.

Freddy’s hand dropped over Ana’s shoulder and closed. Not a painful grip by any means, but at the same time, one that made it clear it could be, and with damned little effort. “KEEP CLEAR OF THE STAGE,” he said again, omitting the ‘please’. “RULE NUMBER ELEVEN, DO NOT CLIMB OR PULL ON THE ANIMATRONICS. SERIOUS INJURY CAN RESULT. FAZBEAR ENTERTAINMENT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR INJURIES THAT MAY OCCUR WHEN THE RULES FOR SAFETY ARE IGNORED.”

Ana reached out and touched Bonnie’s hand. 

Bonnie jerked violently, his arm flailing out and smacking her hand away as a consequence. He staggered one step back, then two forward, bending over so suddenly and so far she thought he was going to topple right off the stage; so did Freddy, whose grip on her shoulder made the leap from firm to painful in a split-second before he yanked her back against the hard bow of his bear-belly, his other hand snapped straight up and out like an over-enthusiastic seig heil, slapping up against Bonnie’s chest. 

For a while, Bonnie only stood there like that, bent at the waist, leaned up against Freddy’s hand, ears flopping comically on the top of his head, while the pins and gears supporting them could be seen twitching and grinding through the crater where his face used to be. Then: “IT’S G-G-GREAT TO SEE-E-E YOU, LITTLE F-FR-FRIEND, BUT P-PLEASE DO NOT INTERRUPT THE B-B-BAND DURING A PERFORMANCE. I’LL C-C-COME SEE YOU WHEN THE SET IS OVER, OK-K-KAY?” 

“Little friend, huh?” She had to laugh, less at the words themselves than at the very real and very deep pang of hurt that came with them. “Yeah, sure. Every other guy I ever spent the night with pretended he didn’t know me in the morning. Why should you be any different?”

His head began to shake back and forth like a man saying ‘No’ over and over and over as his muzzle mechanisms trembled and shivered and if that weren’t answer enough, he said, “I C-C-CAN’T T-T-TALK NOW. G-G-GO SIT D-D-DOWN AND I’LL S-S-SEE YOU S-S-SOON.”

“Yeah, sure.” Smiling, shaking her head, Ana looked around the dining room, forcing herself to see it the way it was and not the way she remembered it from her pill-colored dreams of last night, then back up at him. “I thought we had something special, Bon. I really did. How sad is that?”

His hands clenched, cracking the neck of his guitar where he still held it. The tremors became more violent, rattling the looser components of his casing and making his ears jitter in their sockets. “D-D-D-DO NOT-T-T T-T-TOUCH-CH TH-THE NO D-D-DO NOT T-T-TOUCH-THE D-DO NOT-T-T PLEASE NO DO NOT-T-T TOUCH-CH-CH D-D-DO NOT TOUCH-CH-CH THE ANAMAT-T-TRONICS FREDDY P-PLEASE. YOU M-M-MAY B-B-BE ASKED-D-D T-T-TO LEAVE.”

“DON’T FIGHT,” said Freddy. She could feel the vibrations of his deep voice, not just against the back of her head where she touched the part of his casing covering his speaker, but all down her back.

“I’m not fighting,” said Ana. She pushed at the arm that held her pinned against him, but couldn’t budge it. Finding herself trapped was not alarming, but it did put more of an edge in her voice than either she meant or he deserved when she said, “There’s nothing to fight about. Apparently, nothing even happened.” 

Still bent at the waist, Bonnie’s upper body nevertheless managed to yank itself back to a spine-snapping degree. He righted himself, still contorting and now smoking a little from his neck and shoulder joints. The smell was rancid, not just hot machine grease and dust, but almost like burning hair. “I’LL C-C-C-OME SEE-EE- _EEEEE_ YOU AFT-T-TER THE SET-T-T,” he said, his voice alternately slowing or washing out to static through his speakers. “O-K-K-KAY?”

“No, it’s fine,” said Ana, still tugging at Freddy’s immoveable arm. “I’m leaving. Go on with your show.”

Chica had finished the song alone and she must have known it, because rather than stumble through half of a double-routine, she had gone into a solo closing act, chatting on about all the animals of the meadow and asking all the phantom children how lucky they were to live in a place like Mammon, where they could see froggies and lizards and bluebirds every day. But they should never forget it was everyone’s job to take care of those animals by taking care of their homes. “SWAMPY,” she concluded, turning toward the motionless, eyeless alligator in the back of the room. “WHAT ARE SOME OF THE WAYS OUR FRIENDS CAN HELP PROTECT NATURE?” Then she fell silent, ostensibly to listen as Swampy lectured the room on recycling or composting or planting trees or whatever he was programmed to say, although her eyes darted back now and then to Bonnie beside her.

“I’LL C-C-COME SEE-E- _EEEE_ YOU _IN THE MEADOW_ P-P-PLEASE D-D-DON’T GO T-T-TOUCH THE ANIMAT-T-T-T-TRONICS P-P-PLEASE NO. I W-W-WANT TO I WANT-T-T TO SEE YOU _IN THE MEADOW MEADOW MEADOW_ AFTER TH-TH-THE SET-T-T.”

Ana felt a wheeze of engine-hot air stir the hairs on the back of her head like a short sigh. Freddy moved her aside as impersonally as a chair that happened to be in his way and took a step toward the stage, catching Bonnie’s free-flailing hand in one of his and reaching up to grip the broken edge of Bonnie’s head in the other. “DON’T FIGHT,” he said again. “BONNIE. LOOK AT ME. OPEN YOUR EYES. DON’T FIGHT.”

Bonnie shook his head again, but this time, it seemed less like a seizure and more like anyone shaking his head just to say no. He grabbed at Freddy’s supporting arm, missed, and grabbed again, twitching and spitting out random sound-bites of static, words and song. 

“Are you okay?” asked Ana stupidly. “Bonnie?”

Bonnie shook. Something inside him popped and he collapsed onto his knees on the padded stage, sending out foul plumes of mold spores from every joint. His head went back in fits until the tips of his ears were scratching at his own ass. The guitar slipped from his hand and landed beside him; with every spastic rise and fall of his arm, he hit it.

When Ana bent over the stage to take his guitar and move it out of Bonnie’s reach, Freddy turned his head toward her.

“WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES,” he said heartily after a few random clicks. “WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. PLEASE LEAVE.”

Bonnie’s speakers let out a high, harsh screech.

“PLEASE WAIT OUTSIDE,” said Freddy. “THE ARCADE, PIRATE’S COVE AND THE PLAY AREAS ARE STILL OPEN AND AVAILABLE FOR YOUR USE. WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES. BE CALM. DON’T FIGHT. PLEASE WAIT OUTSIDE UNTIL THE DINING ROOM IS RE-OPENED. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.”

Ana backed away, feeling that special kind of anger that only comes from guilt burning a hole in her heart. Bonnie was old and Bonnie was breaking, but he’d been fine—relatively—until Ana started talking to him. Now here he was, shaking himself apart right in front of her eyes while Freddy did his best to hold him together until a repairman arrived, which would be right around the fifth of Never, mid-afternoon.

It was Foxy all over again, blaming him for something he’d never done, only this time, she’d done it dead sober. What was _wrong_ with her?

Ana backed up some more, but Bonnie’s convulsions were too hard to watch. Doing her best to ignore the awful sounds of mechanical failure behind her, she retrieved her pack from under the table. She left the garbage bags that had been her bed, but took the roll and stuffed that in her pack, too. Waste not, want not. 

She should have left then, straight out the West Hall to the side door next to Tux, but she didn’t. She went out the T-section at the back of the room instead, pulling apart the interlocking mash of tables, chairs and shelves that blocked the door to the playground. The door was locked when she reached it, but it was just one of those push-bar doors and the jamb was rotted out, so a few good kicks were enough to ‘unlock’ it. Opening it was still difficult, however; most of the sand that had once softened the ground had blown away, piling up in a thick drift against this side of the building. It came spilling in over the toes of her boots as she stepped out, so that the door dragged and could not close again, despite its considerable weight.

Ana lingered under the eaves where it was shadier as her eyes adjusted to the morning light, then moved out onto the playground. The further she went, the thinner the sand beneath her became. By the time she was past the swings and the spring-rockers, she was clumping across exposed concrete. Anyone reckless enough to attempt the climb to the crow’s nest of the pirate ship was guaranteed a broken bone at the first bad fall, which was itself guaranteed, given the degree of rot, rust and weathering in every rope, chain and board.

Ana stopped to peer through the clouded portholes of the ship, but that was the limit of her curiosity and it was not rewarded, so she moved on. When she reached the fence, she set her pack down, hooked her fingers through the chain links, and leaned into it.

She could see the quarry, just a shadow on the ground between the trees, and beyond it, the red hills and grey slopes of Coldslip Mountain. Midway up the winding road she could not see would be Aunt Easter’s house. If it were dark and if it the porch light were lit, she’d be able to see it from here, shining through the pines. That was where she should be now, not here. She should toss her pack and climb this fence, sparing herself the sight of Bonnie as she’d left him, thrashing on the show-stage with Freddy holding his hand and waiting, waiting, waiting for repairs. In time, with, as Rider would say, the proper application of some common household chemicals in the correct proportions, she could convince herself she’d never been here at all, just spent the night stoned to the stars in the parking lot. She could pretend until she believed it, and maybe eventually laugh about the time she’d been so high, she dreamed she’d spent one night at Freddy’s.

She could…but she didn’t. Her clothes were still hanging over Tux at the end of the hall, but that wasn’t why she didn’t leave. She held on to the fence and watched the quarry and did not think at all about how she was waiting or what she was waiting for.

The wind gusted. The rusty chains supporting the two surviving swings creaked. The smell of sage grew stronger; the stink of the quarry did too, becoming something that was nearly a taste. If she’d had anything in her stomach, it might have come up. She didn’t, so she turned her head and spat, then went back to watching and waiting.

Behind her, somewhat muffled but not as much as it would be if the door was all the way closed, she heard the jumble of junk piled up in the hall being shifted. Well, not shifted as much as thrown around. Someone was coming, someone who could lift a cafeteria table and fling it away with a crash further down the hall, not just once but over and over. As someone who had seen the ruin inside the restaurant, she knew the animatronics were not programmed to clean or even care about their environment, but she wouldn’t have thought them capable of active destruction. Nevertheless, she felt no apprehension on hearing it. She waited.

The door scraped open on the sand. “HI THERE!”

All this time, she thought she was waiting for Freddy to come tell her either the restaurant was closed or the dining room was open, but she felt no surprise to hear Bonnie’s voice.

She turned around and there he was, his lenses catching the sunlight and throwing it out in dazzles. “Hi, Bonnie.”

His ears lifted, bumping the door jamb. He looked up at it, then stooped and shuffled out onto the playground. “I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY. WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You kind of fell apart in there. I’m sorry if I—”

“HI THERE! 

Her smile faded. “Hi?”

“I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY. WHAT’S YOUR NAME?” 

“Oh.”

Bonnie limped closer, one hand reaching out, palm up, to take hers just the way he’d taken her hand last night, the way he’d taken the hands of hundreds of little girls before her. “HI THERE! I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY!”

“Wow.” And she had to laugh. “Wow, what is wrong with me?”

“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

“None of it was real, was it?” she murmured, searching the ruined hollow of his faceless head. “I don’t know what the hell was in those little pink pills, but it really did the trick. I can’t believe I imagined everything.”

His internal gears ground and exposed metal rods jittered as the muzzle he no longer had lifted up for one of his big bunny laughs. He said, “YOU CAN DO ANYTHING IN YOUR IMAGINATION!”

She shook her head a little, laughing at her stupid self while Bonnie’s servos loudly spun. “And I can’t believe how much it hurts. I am legit devastated here.” She touched her eyes and looked with smiling wonder on the moisture she took away. “You broke my heart, Bonnie,” she told him. “I finally let myself go and fall in love at first sight and you broke my heart the very next day. Unbelievable.”

“LET’S BE FRIENDS,” he said. His hands tremored, finger-pins rattling in their sockets with the force of whatever was glitching him out. Some hidden spring let go with a tired twang and his left pinky slipped from its setting and dropped to the ground. “I L-L-LOVE IT WHEN THE WEATHER’S WARM SO I CAN PLAY OUTSIDE. RIGHT, RUMBLE?” he called, twisting at the waist to shove an arm toward the plastic outline of feet bolted to the concrete stand over by the pirate ship. “I LOVE-VE-VE HANGING OUT WITH MY N-N-NEW FRIENDS.”

Ana glanced back at the feet through her hair, then looked up again at Bonnie. 

His head jerked to one side, ears flopping and exposed parts rattling. “LET’S BE FRIENDS,” he said. His cameras tracked her as she picked up his finger and brushed off the stray grains of sand. “LET’S BE FRIENDS. LET’S BE FRIENDS. LET’S BE FRIENDS.”

Ana sat down on the dragon’s humped back and took Bonnie by the hand. His happy hyucking voice fell silent, but his mechanisms kept humming fast and loud as he watched her peer into his pinky socket and fit his finger back in place. “You need another screw, my man,” she told him and waited, but he did not answer, didn’t even waggle his ears. His servos spun faster for a second or two and that was all. “But this is the best I can do for now,” she finished with a sigh, taking the screwdriver from her pocket and using it to fish out the slipped end of the spring and push it back into place.

“I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

Ana put the screwdriver back in her pack and took a moment to inventory its contents. Phone, check. Garbage bags, also check. She had everything she she’d come in with and then some. Time was passing. The house was waiting. So why was she still here?

Because there was something else she wanted.

Bonnie followed her down the hall when she walked away from him. Chica came as far as the doorway of the kitchen to watch her pass by, but although she did not greet Ana, something about Bonnie apparently triggered her, because she chirped, “I’M MAKING MY SPECIAL BREAKFAST PIZZA! WANT SOME?”

Bonnie stopped in his tracks. Arms and ears twitching wildly, he turned toward Chica and said, “DO I EVEN WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S ON IT?”

“EGGS, BACON AND BREAKFAST CEREAL, OF COURSE!”

“UH…EGGS?”

“OH RELAX,” said Chica, flapping her hand. “THEY’RE LIZARD EGGS.”

Swampy must have had a line there, because both Chica and Bonnie turned to look at him, then burst out laughing.

Ana continued on and left them to it. The odd angles and echoing halls had a way of distorting sounds. Their voices seemed to recede much further than she knew she left them behind her. When she turned up the hall that led to the security room, their words were buried beneath the sound of her boots on the broken tiles and soon, she couldn’t hear them at all.

Ana made her way to the security office by feel, then brought out her phone and coaxed a few seconds of light from its screen, enough to get her bearings and make sure the room she was in was really the one she remembered. It was. Everything was just the same: the doorless openings on north and south walls leading from this corridor to the employee break room; the closed door on the east wall, still locked; the safety window on the west wall with its inset speaker for communicating with concerned customers and the tiny portal for passing lost or found items back and forth; the desk that made a kind of cubicle within this small space, its drawers on bent runners that wouldn’t allow them to close; and the tall cupboards lining the south wall.

It was the cupboard she’d come for, but for now, she groped her way to the lounge door (the jamb was cold under her hand, metal instead of wood), and tapped her phone to life once more. It gave her only a sullen beep and a dim flash of reddish light, then shut itself off again, but it was enough to show her the poster of Freddyland hanging on the wall and the closet where she could have sworn she and Bonnie had hidden from Freddy the night before. He’d played with her hair. She’d sung Mia Rose’s _If You’ll Be My Man_ until they were singing it together, softly, in the dark.

Seriously, though, what were those little pink pills?

Ana stepped out of the doorway (the odd jamb again snagged her attention; if she had a little more power in her phone, she could have stayed to investigate, but she didn’t) and felt her way a few steps aside to the cupboards on the back of this wall. She opened them one by one, feeling at the shelves within until she found the cardboard box she remembered. She couldn’t see it, but she knew what it looked like, knew there was writing on its facing side spelling out _Lost and Found_ in black, broad-tipped marker. And on top of the pile of coats, shoes, stuffed animals and dropped toys, she found the plastic lunchbox she’d been looking for. She couldn’t see it and didn’t need to. It was a Fazbear Band lunchbox, just like those still on the decaying shelves in the gift shop, but cleaner, of course. 

She picked it up, opened it, and stirred her fingers once through the plastic pieces filling it. She closed it up again, opened her day pack and put the lunchbox inside.

As she was straightening up, she heard footsteps in the hall. Bonnie’s, she was sure. Freddy’s stride was similar, but he was heavier and although his toes on one side were bare to the metal bones and loose in their joints so that they scraped along the ground with each step, Bonnie’s whole leg dragged when his knee locked up. This was not Freddy’s _scraaaape_ -thud _scraaaape_ -thud, but a relatively lighter and quicker whump- _ssshhhhhh_ whump- _ssshhhhh_.

There was no way she could know any of that, given the unreliability of her memories from last night, but sure enough, it was Bonnie who appeared in the security office window, his camera lights illuminating little apart from the ruin inside his head. He looked in at her, twitched, and continued on his way. 

Probably coming to tell her customers shouldn’t hang around in the security room without a guard on duty or something like that. Well, she was done here, wasn’t she? 

Ana stepped out into the hall to meet him and there was Bonnie, limping toward her. She smiled. “Coming to meet me in the closet?” 

His servos whirred louder. He said, “HI THERE! I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

“You don’t need to know my name,” she said and waited, but he didn’t sing. His gears ground and his head jerked to one side a few times, and that was all.

Further down the hall, Freddy lurched by, pausing to look their way before moving on, apparently deciding that one animatronic per customer was enough interaction. He must have gone into Pirate Cove; she heard the gruff rise and fall of Foxy’s voice, but not enough of it to tell which story he was telling before the door woofed shut and took it away.

“Come here, my man,” said Ana.

Bonnie’s ears twitched. He shuffled forward a few steps. “HI THERE,” he said. “I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE—”

Ana reached out and tugged on his chest. The front panel popped open. His eyes went dark immediately and he sagged on his pins, but didn’t fall over. Neither did he go completely quiet, although the mechanisms in his head slowed and stopped. When she opened the panel all the way, releasing a pulse of heat onto her own chest, she could hear his internal systems still working away, doing whatever it was they did.

She needed light for this. Ana brought out her phone, but it wouldn’t even tell her the battery was dead anymore. She put it away, thought, then fished around in the side flap of her pack until she found her lighter. Holding it well back, just in case there was something in there that was flammable, Ana struck a flame.

Mechanical things had always held a strong fascination for her, so for a while, she just watched his systems work, hypnotized by the sight of a real, functioning clockwork human right at her fingertips. His endoskeleton did not mimic bones in the sense of individual ribs or vertebrae, but did have the same general structure. Likewise, his cooling system pulled in air with twin bellows, expanding and contracting like lungs. The rubbery funnel of his mouth dropped down through his body to a deflated sac low in his abdomen, with an access port dangling off to one side to aid flushing. At the center of his chest was a transparent casing edged in what sure looked like gold, with a console of some kind set on the left. 

There were no buttons on the console, no ports, no switches, nothing that could allow an idle bump to interfere with the animatronic’s functions, just three indicators, two dark and one lit, to show her which mode he was on: Day. Ana touched each of the indicators, because of course she did, but touching them did nothing and her attention was already fixed elsewhere. On the other side of the console, behind the glass, a complicated network of gears, tubes and transistors moved together to form a single pulsing artifact, pumping out power through branching cables into the part of his spine enclosed by this box, and from there, presumably, along his endoskeleton to every other part of his body.

She touched the case cautiously, finding it hot but not so much that it burnt her fingers, and so began hunting for some way to open it. There were no catches, no hinges, no buttons. On the other hand, there were no cracks either. Her questing fingers found one small sign of damage—a tiny round hole on the left side of the console, which had perhaps once fitted a screw. 

Oh well. If she couldn’t get at his actual heart, she’d have to do the best she could with what she had.

Ana opened her pack and found a Sharpie. 

A few seconds later, she capped it and tucked it away, then closed Bonnie’s chest.

His servos whined to life. His eyes lit. He raised his head and said, “SYSTEM ERROR. CLOCK DISCREPANCY DETECTED. CORRECTING.” He clicked. “CORRECTED.” He twitched, just once, but violently enough that one of his ears smacked the wall, then focused in on her and started right in again. “HI THERE! I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

Ana smiled at him. It didn’t feel very happy, even on her end, but she couldn’t help herself. “I’m glad the road washed out,” she told him. “I’m so glad I finally got to meet you. I will always remember this night…even if it never really happened.”

“I LOVE MEETING NEW FRIENDS,” said Bonnie, twitching. “LET’S ROCK! I LOVE JAMMING WITH MY NEW FRIENDS! LET’S PLAY TOGETHER! I LOVE— ” He glitched out on the last word, spitting v-sounds for several seconds before snapping out of it with, “—PIZZA.” His ears drooped and shoulders sagged. “WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE KIND OF PIZZA? I LOVE PEPPERONI WITH EXTRA CHEESE.”

“Is it okay to touch you?” Ana asked. “Think I can get a hug?”

His muzzle lifted for one of those honking hee-haw laughs, although it cut itself off too soon. “HUGS ARE ALWAYS ON THE MENU AT FREDDY’S,” he assured her and opened his arms.

She hugged him, thinking it might feel silly, but it didn’t. His arms enfolded her; she could feel a tremor in one of his hands where it lay over her braid. His casing was hard and scratchy where the flocking hadn’t rubbed off yet. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss his jaw, then rested her cheek against his grungy chest and closed her eyes. He stank.

“I LOVE MAKING NEW FRIENDS,” he told her.

She sighed. “I have to go now.”

His arms tightened when she first pulled away, then opened. He watched her as she shouldered her pack once more, his ears twitching and cameras whirring. “YOU CAN’T GO YET. THE FUN’S JUST STARTING! STAY AND PLAY!”

“Goodbye, Bonnie.”

“HI THERE! I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY!” He turned around to keep her in sight as she walked around him and away. “WHAT’S YOUR NAME? COME B-B-BACK SOON! I L-L-L-LOVE MAKING-ING NEW FRIENDS! HI THERE!”

At the intersection, Ana turned left, back toward the dining room. It would have been quicker to cut across Pirate Cove and go straight out the side door next to Tux, but she didn’t want to talk to Foxy, even if all she knew he’d say was Ahoy. She wasn’t angry at him, although she could still remember being angry. She was a little afraid the anger would come rushing back if she were face to face with Captain Fox again, but she was more afraid of tears. 

“HI THERE!” said Bonnie, falling further and further behind her as she crossed the dining room. “I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY!”

“HI BONNIE,” said Chica, now on stage with Freddy. She waved and Bonnie jerked around, sputtering and twitching, to wave back.

“HEY, CH-CH-CHICA! WH-WHAT’S UP-P-P?”

“THE CEILING, SILLY. I THOUGHT EVERYBODY KNEW THAT.”

Freddy said nothing, but he turned his head to watch as Ana pushed open the door to the hall that led to Tux and the boarded-up exit. 

“You’re not even going to say goodbye?” she asked, looking back at him.

“THE RESTAURANT IS CLOSED.”

“Heartwarming,” she said dryly. “You’re kind of a jerk. You know that, don’t you?”

Freddy grunted and folded his arms. 

“LET’S BE FRIENDS,” said Bonnie, limping toward Ana again. “LET’S BE FRIENDS. LET’S BE FRIENDS. LET’S BE FRIENDS. LET’S—”

“COME BACK SOON!” Chica called, waving.

“Bye,” said Ana and let the door close behind her.

She wasn’t far down the hall before she heard it open.

“HI THERE,” said Bonnie. “I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT’S YOUR NAME? WAIT-T-T! HI THERE! I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT’S YOUR NAME? P-P-PLEASE! COME B-B-B-BACK SOON! HI THERE!”

Ana went to Tux and collected her still-damp clothes, wadding them all together and stuffing them into her pack. Was she stalling just to let Bonnie struggle down the hall? She was not. She was just…doing…something else. 

Fuck it. She hunkered down, pushing the door open and shoving her pack through onto the walk.

“I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT’S YOUR NAME? WHAT’S-S-S YOUR NAME? WHAT’S YOUR N-N-NAME? WH-WH-WH-WHAT’S YOUR-R-R-R N-N-N-NAME?”

“You don’t need to know my name,” Ana told him, smiling back at him over her shoulder. “I wrote it on your heart.”

She squeezed through under the loosened boards and out, letting the glass door shut behind her, muffling Bonnie’s persistent request to be friends mid-word, but she could still hear him. As she walked along the side of the building on the cracked pavement, he kept pace with her on the other side of the window and she could hear his scratchy, stuttering voice, telling her he loved hanging out with his new friends, he loved rocking out on the guitar, he loved playing with the band, he loved it when the weather was warm enough that he could play outside, and between each effort to engage her in conversation, he reminded her he was her best buddy and what was her name? 

Ana went to the rear of the truck, checked and tightened the trailer hitch, then opened up the driver’s door and tossed her pack inside. She climbed in after it, shut the door, buckled her belt, started the engine, plugged her phone into the charger, and, against her will, looked back.

She could see hints of purple between the boards—Bonnie, pacing up and down the hall in front of her truck. He’d probably stay there as long as he could see her. And she knew he was just a big toy and had no real feelings about it, but he looked so frantic, so distressed. Who knew how long he’d been here without anyone to entertain? Who knew how long it would be before another one broke in?

Maybe it would have been kinder to leave him shut down. Or sleeping, or whatever it meant when his chest was open.

Maybe she should just leave bad enough alone and stay away.

But as Ana glanced down at her day pack beside her in the passenger seat, she knew she couldn’t do that. She’d have to come back, if only once more.

# * * *

She had told Rider she was five minutes from the house. In reality, it was eleven. The distance between the flat top of Coldslip Mountain and Edge of Nowhere was little more than two miles as the crow flies. If that crow were driving, however, it was closer to five, and this morning, that crow would also be navigating around all the downed branches and boulders the storm had pushed out into the muddy road. 

Once out of the red hardpan of the desert and into the foothills, the long, flat, straight road became a series of climbs and falls, each one taller and steeper than the next, until she reached the mountain itself and its many hairpin turns, where the road narrowed to a single lane with a sheer rock face on one side and a sheer drop onto more rocks on the other. Wherever the rockface had cracked, groundsprings that might otherwise be visible only as an incongruous wet shine on dry stone now gushed like miniature Niagaras, overspilling the neglected culverts.

Picturesque, maybe, but it made for treacherous driving and Ana took her time with it until the terrain evened out and the road brought her away from the cliffs to the forests, and from there to the narrow lane with its solitary mailbox standing guard beside it that marked the turn to Aunt Easter’s house.

The mailbox was much-battered and the name on the side had weathered away, leaving nothing behind but a few flakes of indecipherable black paint that might have been letters once, or numbers, or little dancing stickmen for all they resembled now, but Ana took it as an encouraging sign that it still stood at all. In the grand hierarchy of vandalism, mailboxes were the lowest rung; if no one had been by to knock it over or blow it up, maybe the debt collector guy was right when he said the local youths were leaving the property alone. Time alone could still do a number on a house, but time didn’t use spray paint or cherry bombs.

Ana downshifted into all-wheel drive before turning onto the dirt road and felt all four tires sink and briefly struggle before finding traction in the mud. The way was badly overgrown; branches slapped at the windshield and scraped the side of the truck, making just a godawful noise every second of this last length, until it closed off entirely in a green curtain where Aunt Easter’s weeping willows had once flanked the end of the drive.

Ana drove through it and there the house suddenly stood, revealed all at once and in the unflinching light of this miserable Utah morning. She parked in the middle of the unkempt drive that used to circle a flowerbed and fountain and which now housed a thicket of weeds and broken stone basin, and just looked at it for a while.

She decided, objectively speaking, it wasn’t that bad. At least not as bad as it could have been, given the extremes of the climate and twelve years abandonment, but even without those qualifiers, it wasn’t that bad. The yard was out of control, the house needed paint and the porch would probably have to be completely redone, but the roof was the biggest problem she could see.

The biggest she could see out here, she corrected herself. If the roof was leaking—and those missing shingles on the west end suggested it was—the water damage she might encounter inside could easily force her to reassess her determination to see this through. If it was anywhere near as bad here as it was inside Freddy’s, she might as well demolish the whole thing, slap down some pre-fab piece of shit and walk away.

Much as she tried to cling to the second half of that thought—the work, even the hopelessness of the best possible outcome of that work—it was to Freddy’s she could feel her mind moving. Not because of the mold or the water stains or the rotting sheetrock, peeling paint and crumbling mortar, either. The remembered stink did try to assert itself, but only as it related to the animatronics themselves. To Bonnie, especially. The smell of him—black mold and plastic—filling her nostrils when she’d kissed him down in the maze and again this morning, when she’d said goodbye. That smell that was Death, so much more than simple rotting meat or burnt bone could be. 

She wondered why that was and decided, still gazing up at her aunt’s house, that Bonnie’s wasn’t the smell of Death crawling out from under the bed or up the basement steps in the deep of the night. It wasn’t Death when it comes raining down from the sky with bombs or tearing through your flesh with bullets. It wasn’t blood and fire and screaming and terror, the way you’d think Death ought to be. It was the quiet Death, the one that follows you when you wander away from the picnic and fall into some forgotten well. It is the Death that finds you lying on a mildewed mattress in the backroom of the flophouse where you take that hot shot, the one that sits up and watches you when you sit on the side of the bathtub and test the edge of the razor with growing confidence on the inside of your arm. It is the smell of the Death that knows you when everyone else has forgotten; it is the Death that comes for the Lost.

Which meant she had to wonder…if she could recognize it when she smelled it, did that make her one of the lost? Or one of the dead?

She thought about it as she and the house took one another’s measure, but the only conclusion she reached was that she was probably still high. 

Then she pulled up around the fountain-bed and parked close to where she remembered the gate to be, although the pickets that had fenced in the overgrown yard had either collapsed or been overtaken by the jungle of weeds that had choked out her aunt’s neat lawn. Those could just come out, the part of her that was still thinking in terms of fixing up and selling the property noted. A fenced yard was pretty to look at, but wasn’t as good a selling point as custom shelves, which took the same amount of money and far less muscle, and also could be done indoors and did not depend on good weather.

So thinking, deliberately looking over the grounds rather than the house, with all its unknowns (and memories), Ana took her pack, got out of the truck and went around to the back, squeezing between it and the trailer just long enough to hook an arm in and fetch her machete from its holding place on the dome wall. 

She cut her way to the porch steps, following the gentle curve of the flagstone path she could not see, but which she could feel beneath her boots and the thick growth of grassy weeds—the same path she could only now remember running up with her scrawny arms laden with grocery bags, following David as he asked if he could start the fire in the barbeque pit, and Aunt Easter telling him he could, but not yet, to wait for…someone. The name was a black hole in Ana’s mind, but it came sort of with a face. With a smile, anyway. A broad smile, all teeth, beneath twin flashes that was sunlight on a pair of glasses.

The image lingered for a moment, struggling to come into sharper focus or at least to tether itself to other memories now rising up from the tar of her forgotten childhood, but Ana pushed it away in the end. She didn’t know the man and certainly didn’t need to know him any better now. Ana could not remember her aunt ever dating and was confident she’d never been married, but the disparity didn’t bother her. Her aunt had always been pretty, with long blonde hair and laughing eyes, not to mention the sort of body a child didn’t notice but which grown-Ana looking back could admit had been pretty damned eye-popping. And after all, she hadn’t found David under a cabbage leaf. Little Ana might not have attached any significance to the occasional visits of a man-friend, but Aunt Easter must have enjoyed the company of a man from time to time. According to at least one of Mammon’s citizens, one of those men had been the Devil, so Aunt Easter had obviously had some wild nights in this quiet little town. God knew, that couldn’t have been an easy reputation to drag around in this place. No wonder she chose to live clear out in the ass-end of nowhere, miles from the nearest neighbor, no one looking down on you but the stars.

Ana reached the porch, cut an opening through the dead ivy and creepers that curtained it, and peered inside. When nothing leapt out at her, she left the machete leaning against the side of the house and mounted the steps, testing each one before letting it take her full weight. 

It wasn’t a warm day, being late February and not even noon, and it was cooler under the covered porch, and darker. It felt more like descending into a crypt than climbing up into a house, and the smell added credence to the illusion—earthy and sour, the stink of dried and decaying vegetation heavy in the air, lessened only when the wind gusted and brought the quarry right into her mouth.

The full windows to either side of the heavy doors were crusted in dirt on the outside and hung with curtains on the inside, making it impossible to see anything, even the smallest clue, of the interior. Ana wasted a little time exploring anyway, but all she found were cobwebs, half a dozen mud dauber nests, and a scattering of feathers, birdshit and pellets made of compressed hair and bones to prove that owls dormed here at least some of the time. And the doors themselves, of course.

Those massive wooden doors with the carved panels and the brass latches swooping out from the center, like something you’d find on a castle. Sometimes, Aunt Easter would seize both latches at once and whoooosh them open in a grand, glorious gesture, crying, “We’re home!” like they’d been away for years, questing in the mountains and fighting dragons instead of just at the store or the movies. And David and Ana would shout along with her as they tumbled inside, swept up by her momentum: “Home! Home!”

Home.

There were papers stapled up over those doors now, white and yellow and blue and that unique shade of last-chance pink, all their lawyerly jargon weathered out to a whisper. Shreds of yellow tape fluttered in the breeze. And there was a lock, one of those heavy real-estate tumble boxes, hooked through both latches together and shut tight. 

Ana hefted the lock, thinking. It represented no real obstacle, but it annoyed her that neither the debt collector guy in Salt Lake nor Mrs. Rutter right here in Mammon had offered her a key or even warned her of the existence of this lock, when one of them had been responsible for putting it here. 

She had bolt cutters in the truck—somewhere—and it wasn’t any more or less work to unpack for this reason as for any other, but Ana found herself at that odd junction between reluctance and impatience. She didn’t want to shift boxes around, she wanted to get in the damn house. And so, although the ‘key’ to this lock was right behind her, albeit pinned in and covered over by the hodgepodge pieces of her life, in the end, Ana took last night’s still damp hoodie out of her pack, wrapped it around her right fist and forearm, and gave the window next to the door a solid backhanded smack.

It was an old window (the deciding factor on this course of action had been just that, that all the windows would have to be replaced with energy efficient ones anyway), although not a cheap one, and it didn’t break on the first blow, only cracked. Still, two or three careful taps did the trick, and once she’d wiggled the shards free of the brittle lead and pulled them from the pane, she reached in to feel around for the latch she knew had to be there, thinking to unlock the window and let herself in that way.

Funny, isn’t it? How stubbing a toe is more painful than kicking that selfsame table leg or whathaveyou in a moment of temper, however swiftly regretted. There is something in the element of surprise that so amplifies pain that even the least insult is made instantly fuck-worthy. So it was that Ana, having punched open a window without flinching, now reached that same hand through it, unexpectedly encountered an immoveable object with force enough to stub three fingers, pop two knuckles and break a nail, and sucked in a startled hiss of air around the word, “Fuck!” that would have been a yell if anyone else had been saying it.

What in the hell had she hit? Belatedly cautious, Ana prodded at the curtain and to her amazement, touched the thinnest of thin drapes separating her fingers from what seemed to be a solid sheet of wood.

Well, okay. In retrospect, that was reasonable. The debt guy, or maybe even her aunt, had done this to protect the house against intruders or weather or whatever, just on that side of the glass and with a curtain in between so it didn’t look as derelict as it in fact was. 

Did that mean all the windows were boarded up? She thought so, but didn’t feel like smashing every window on the ground floor just to prove herself right or wrong.

However, just pushing on the obstruction didn’t remove it. Whatever this board was, it wasn’t the typical quarter-inch sheet of particle plywood. Even with all her weight behind it, it didn’t give, didn’t even bow out in the middle.

It looked like she’d be unpacking the truck after all.

So she did, keeping one sour eye on the clouds, which seemed to have noticed her and were thickening rapidly. Although the integrity of the porch was by no means assured, it was covered and better defense against the inevitable than open ground. She just tried to spread the weight out over the visibly rotten spots and get to her tools as fast as possible.

In due time, she was back at the window with a crowbar, knocking out all the glass so she could wedge her weapon in around the frame, prying the board up and, with it, pushing the nails out. 

It took a lot of work and not just because of the difficult angle. Whoever had done this not only used a solid piece of lumber, but a metric fuckton of nails. Every inch, a new nail. And this wasn’t a case of nailgun-itis, because even though Ana couldn’t see much from her disadvantaged vantage, she could tell they were any number of sizes and weights. Someone had hammered in each of those nails by hand. 

For the moment, she was determined not to care; she could even pretend it was better this way, that the longer nails could continue supporting the board so she wouldn’t have to worry about it slipping on her while she was still working her way around at turtle-speed. Once she got the whole thing loose, she could give one almighty shove and slam the thing out of her way.

It was to this goal she worked—the shove, the echoing bang as it hit her aunt’s hardwood parlor floor, the anticipation of that first musty smell and the unknown area beyond that would either be not as bad or so much worse than what she had been bracing herself against. She did not allow herself to think of anything else, not the condition of the house or the impending rain or even last night’s curious adventures, but just loosening this nail and moving on to the next nail, repeating as necessary until she had pushed them all screaming out of the window frame. She could sense the weight of the board as it sagged on its increasingly fewer and fewer pins, and so it was with great satisfaction that she came to her starting point at last, set aside her crowbar, squared off, and slammed both hands into the exact center of the curtained board.

Later, after half a joint and a lot of deliberation, she would decide that the sensation was a lot like being hit simultaneously in both shoulders with a baseball bat, and she would muse quite a long time on the difference between kicking a table leg and stubbing one’s toe on it. 

Oh, she knocked the board off, all right. When she hit it, its last few nails either popped right out of their wooden beds or ripped the dry-rotted molding of the frame to pieces, and in either case, it came free. As she stumbled back, both shoulders so alive with shock and pain that she honestly thought she’d dislocated them, the board dropped with a nail-studded _shhhhhunk_ , just like the blade of a guillotine, straight down. It couldn’t fly out and belly-flop onto the floor as she’d imagined; when she caught the curtain and pulled it aside, she saw there couldn’t have been more than a two-inch gap between the window frame and the wall of boxes filling her view.

Ana stared for a long time, too stunned to process what she was seeing. When at last she pushed at the wall of boxes—first on this one, then on that one—she found it just as immoveable as her still-aching shoulders told her they were. Whoever had stacked them had done so with considerable skill; putting her eye to the cracks between these cardboard bricks, Ana could only make out a narrowing shadowy wedge of depth without real dimension. There was no way of knowing how deeply they were stacked, or how high, beyond the fact that they went higher and wider than the window.

She could have tried another window. She thought about it, but even at its inception, the thought was a queasy one. Later, somewhat less than pleasantly stoned, she could admit the only reason she hadn’t was simply that she was afraid to find what she ultimately found anyway. No. She had stubbed her toe twice on the house already; this time, she drew her leg back and kicked.

She reached out, her fingers scratching and prodding at box after box until she found one she could work loose from the wall. It took a lot of wiggling, being pinned in on every other side but this one and weighted, not only by its own contents, but by the other boxes overlying it. Removing it meant destabilizing the entire structure, but although she tensed for an avalanche, she heard none. There were plenty of boxes wedged together above this one, but they were too tightly packed to fall.

When she pulled out the box, there was another behind it. She stared for a moment into the cavity she had created (she was reminded, unwelcomely and uncomfortably, of Bonnie) then set the box in her hands down and tried to open it. The flaps were sealed with so much tape, she gave up and went back to the truck and her tool chest for a utility knife, then cut her way in, already knowing, just by the feel of the thing in her arms, what she would find.

She was sort of right. Her guess had been newspapers—heavy, but solid and quiet. The reality was magazines. Old ones, but new-looking, unread. The titles were eclectic to say the least. Quilters, Field and Stream, The New Yorker, People, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, Senior Living, Better Homes, Sports Illustrated, as well as a wide assortment of periodicals catering to even more specific tastes, from bow hunting to home canning to gardening to improving your sex life. The one thing they all had in common was that their front covers had all been ripped off. Most issues had multiple copies, although they weren’t always grouped together, not by month and not even by title. In fact, there didn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to how they were arranged, beyond filling the box to its maximum capacity. 

In mounting disbelief, Ana excised another box and then another and another, until she had hollowed out a space large enough to climb into and still she kept digging, tunneling upward as boxes collapsed on top of her. Magazines predominated, but she also found cases of decades’ old baby formula powder, knockoff generic action figures with names like Iron Hero and Superbat, plastic purses shaped like daisies, and cheap decorations to cover every holiday from New Year’s Eve to Christmas.

It was too much to sort through, too much to look at. Soon, she wasn’t even opening them, just flinging them as they fell or as she pried them loose out onto the porch, until she breached the last layer—

—and touched the ceiling.

Ana pulled a few more boxes down from the side of her excavation, but only a few. She retreated on shaky legs back down and out through the broken window onto the porch. She had to kick boxes out of the way in order to find room enough to stand. There seemed to be so many more of them here than could have fit in the tiny space she had opened.

The rain came. Ana hardly noticed. She was not thinking, exactly, not the kind of thoughts that come with words, but an idea had begun to grow in her at some point during her dig and now that her frenetic activity had ceased, that idea grew larger, swelling to fill the space she’d made.

Before she knew she was going to do it, she’d retreated from the porch and began to circle the house, peering into every window only to find the same dark curtains, hiding, she was sure, the same wooden boards and the same wall of boxes. Room to room, it was all potentially the same, but she didn’t break any more glass to see for certain. The debt collector had mentioned seeing broken windows, two broken windows…

And one was there, high in the attic. Impossible to see from here what condition that was in, just that there was no curtain. Ana kept searching and, at the rear of the house, beneath the mudroom, she found the second—a narrow basement window set just a little above ground level. 

The basement had been off-limits as a child. Aunt Easter had told her it was because the house was old and not always safe and there were things down there that could hurt little girls. David said it was haunted. Not trying to scare her and not afraid himself, but not kidding either. If it wasn’t ghosts, she could sort of recall him telling her one day as they rode their bikes out past Edge of Nowhere, then it might be monsters, but something was down there. He’d never seen them, but he heard them moving behind the walls.

Naturally, he and little Ana had explored it on several occasions and even played Dungeons or Castles in that forbidden territory when Aunt Easter was at work. The lock on the basement door was one of those cartoony keyhole locks and even if Aunt Easter kept the key hidden somewhere, Ana had only needed one look and a paperclip to pop it open. When Aunt Easter wised up and installed the deadbolt at the very top of the door, well, these tiny windows had been plenty big enough back then for her to wriggle through with room to spare. In any case, in all their explorations, neither Ana nor David had ever uncovered the haunted hellportal her aunt guarded or the hungry ghosts of those miners slouching and slobbering among Christmas decorations and bottles of home-canned jam. It was just a basement, full of old basement junk, and if there were monsters, they lived as David had said, behind the walls, out of sight and out of consequence. 

Still, grown-up Ana hesitated before she got on her hands and knees in the mud and looked through the little window, hoping against hope that she would see her aunt’s kinky sex dungeon or, hell, a meth-lab or anything at all but what she saw: an uneven ocean of boxes, plastic tubs, milk crates, shelves and tables, and all the flotsam and jetsam washing around in it—clothes, camping gear, children’s toys, clothes, bicycles, furniture, kitchen appliances, clothes, sporting goods, bundles of newspapers, unopened bags of diapers and other baby paraphernalia, and clothes. And this was just the stuff she could see and identify. Everywhere she looked, she saw black garbage bags bulging with what, to judge by the rancid time-dried stench, might actually be garbage.

She recognized none of it. None. Of. It. Not one article of clothing lying strewn around her now had ever hung in one of this house’s closets. Of the seven bicycles she could count from here, none of them had been David’s. She had never played on that foosball table or any of those board games. David had never been on a hockey team and would not have needed all those sticks or padding to fit a burly high-schooler anyway. Aunt Easter was a good cook and had her fair share of appliances, but she was not a gadgeter; these unopened boxes of cotton candy makers, pop-up hot dog cookers (with bun toasters!), and milkshake machines were not hers, let alone the dozens of banana slicers, spaghetti twirlers, taco proppers, garlic peelers and other, even more pointless devices.

And it went on and on and on like that, in every direction. It was not a full basement, had perhaps half the footprint of the house, but the hoard made it seem even smaller. She couldn’t see the floor. She couldn’t get even the most haphazard guess as to how deep the hoard went, except that it was deep enough that there was a sofa upended in it, mired like a stump in a swamp. There was no safe path, only a narrow game-trail of sorts winding through and around the more obvious pitfalls to the stairs at the far end of the basement, of which, only two steps were visible, and even those had been mostly buried in stacks of books and shoeboxes.

But on one count, the debt guy had been wrong: he’d claimed the local kids weren’t poking around out here, but the muddy shoeprints in the immediate area on either side of the window proved otherwise. Indeed, the game-trail she had noted leading from this window to the stairs had been made by the regular comings and goings of whoever had been, or perhaps still was, coming and going.

Ana touched the comforting shape of her utility knife through her jeans pocket, then dropped to her belly in the garden bed, shoved her head and one arm through the window, and kick-wriggled her way through, sliding like a graceless otter over smooth-worn boxtops and mud-packed clothes down onto the hoard. She righted herself, knife in hand but not with the blade out, listening. 

She heard only her heartbeat in her ears and the dry scuttle of rats somewhere in the stacks. No monsters. No squatters. No ghosts.

Testing her balance and the stability of the hoard at every hand- or foot-hold, Ana made her way across the basement and deeper into shadows. Her eyes were slow to adjust, but she was even slower to move, so it worked out okay and by the time her questing hand touched the cold concrete stair, she could look up and see the door at the top.

And see that it was open. 

‘The monsters got out,’ she thought and, weirdly, she thought of Freddy’s again.

Shaking her head as if she could throw the thoughts off like rain, she crawled up the dark stairwell. Two steps. Three. Four and then she was there, somewhere above the buried landing with her back brushing the ceiling and her knees sunk into garbage bags wrapping dubious contents, squeezing between a mountain of pillows shaped like Santa heads on one side and half a dozen steel folding chairs on the other to grip the doorknob. She pushed, but the door didn’t open any further. It couldn’t. 

Her heart sinking, Ana turned off her phone’s flashlight, brought the camera app up, stuck her arm through the few inches’ gap and snapped a picture. When she looked at it, she could make out the top eight inches or so of her aunt’s kitchen cabinets. All the rest—the sink, the stove, the refrigerator, the table, the chairs, the door to the mudroom and the hall that led to the front foyer and those carved castle doors—was buried somewhere beneath a sea of junk.

As she stared, her eyes fixed and unblinking upon the wrapped brass finial of a curtain rod that proved this was in fact her aunt’s kitchen and not some horror house she had stumbled into by mistake, Ana heard a low wooden groaning shudder through the timbers, and all of a sudden, she could feel not just the reality of the hoard on which she balanced, but the tremendous weight of the hoard pressing down from the floors above. Because it was there; she knew it without needing to see it. Every room in this goddamned house was filled.

Every room but David’s, she thought. When she finally dug her way up to it and down to the door, she had no doubt it would open freely on a room unchanged from the last time she’d seen it. His clothes would still be in the closet, except for the last ones he’d been wearing, which would be dropped on the floor. The last video game he’d been playing would still be plugged into the console and the controller would still be tossed to one side of the beanbag chair where he and she used to sit when they played. His Ninja Turtles and Batman movie posters would still be on the wall, with his pirate sword hanging between them and one of Freddy’s hats resting on the bedpost. The room Ana used to stay in when she came for the weekends and summers would be buried, unusable, stinking of rats and trash, but David’s room was just fine.

And if her aunt was anywhere in this house, she’d be there. For a moment, a bad moment, Ana could almost see her—a withered mummy dressed in mom-jeans and that deep purple blouse Aunt Easter liked to wear, lying on David’s Spiderman sheets with her bony fingers serene, laced over her stomach, just waiting to be found.

The house groaned again, waking her out of that awful daydream, and Ana retreated, nowhere near as cautiously as she had come. If she could have stood up to run, she would have. As it was, she did not stop moving or really breathe again until she was scratching her way back out into the incredibly open air.

There she lay for some time, staring up at the house, propped partway on her elbows, breathing too hard for the little exertion she had undergone and trying to think in words again instead of pulses of grief and panic. What was she _doing_ here? What could _anyone_ do here? This was not a home any longer and the home that it had been was now so deeply buried no one could ever dig it out. All sentiment aside, what in the flaming _fuck_ was she doing here?

The question dropped away inside her like a rock into a well.

After a long, long while, she thought, ‘I’m going to need a ladder.’

“Why?” she asked the house warily. 

Because when it came to cleaning out the house, she was going to have to start at the top floor and work her way down. Otherwise, it was altogether too easy to imagine her hollowing out the ground floor and the whole house collapsing explosively in on itself.

“I can’t worry about that yet,” Ana said, gathering herself to stand. She felt better on her feet, as if the horror within the house were a heavy gas she could physically rise above. She collected her thoughts, put them in order, and forced herself to look at the house as if it were one of the many she had flipped for Rider. “First things first, I’ve got to get a hold of the sanitation department and find out if I can rent a dump trailer from them or if I have to deal with a third-party service. Either way, I need to start by clearing the driveway so they can get in here and that’s going to take at least two days. Am I going to need a burn permit?” she asked and immediately answered, “Sure as I start burning without one, Sheriff Fuckabuck will be on my doorstep writing me out a citation. Who do I call for one of those? Well, never mind, I can start by laying some of it down over the driveway, or the guy dropping off the dumpster might get mired.”

That sounded like a plan, all right, but the plan sounded wrong. Ana stepped back, her eyes flicking from one waiting repair to another—from loose stones to peeling paint to missing shingles—and still could not find the starting point. 

“Because that’s not the first thing I do,” she realized. “The first thing I do is find that stupid paper with the city contact information on it and stop the sons of bitches who are trying to condemn my aunt’s…my house.”

Nothing happened. Nothing changed. She felt neither welcome nor warning, only the rain.

“My house,” she said again, chewing the words to release their full flavor before swallowing. They were bitter. “Mine.”

And if she wanted to keep it longer than the next ninety days, she had a lot of work to do.


	8. Chapter 8

# CHAPTER EIGHT

It had been years since he’d last seen sunlight with his own eyes, but Foxy’s internal clock worked just fine and he knew the sun went down at 7:57 pm, Mountain Standard Time. Thank God. Another three minutes, and he’d have had to start a new set.

Not that it mattered much. Foxy rarely left the Cove anymore and the others rarely visited just for the sake of visiting. Why should they? After so many years, they’d said about everything there was to say to each other. Chica didn’t talk as such, although she’d still coax him out to the arcade if she could, whereas Freddy’s visits were little more than a scheduled stop on his endless patrol, and he and Bonnie just got on each other’s nerves. No, while he was happy enough to keep company with the others if they dropped by, he spent most nights tucked up in the bow of the ship staring at the cabin door or the curtains and that was usually fine by Foxy. 

It was the girl. People broke in less and less these days, but it was still a common enough occurrence and it got handled in one of two ways: they could leave on their own legs or they could be carried out in pieces and dumped in the quarry. The girl had fit neither of these models and even though she was long gone now, Foxy remained restless. 

His closing program kept him locked up until the top of the next hour after all day-shift staff had vacated the building, which with the restaurant closed, meant he had to wait in that hellish mode that allowed no speech, no movement, only thought. Funny how the shortest waits made him feel the restriction more keenly than the longest ones. He had to remind himself how it could have been; if he were on his other setting, the night mode, he would be frozen here until midnight, waiting for the game to begin.

But he wasn’t, so at 8:00, the restriction lifted and Foxy went into free-mode. He got up at once from the narrow, thinly-padded bench that was supposed to be his bunk and left the cabin. He didn’t bother turning his eyes on. He couldn’t see and he didn’t need to. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been trapped in this restaurant—his internal clock didn’t come with a year indicator—but it had been long enough that he knew his way in the dark. 

Down the gangplank, off the stage, up the stairs and out into the West Hall, where he gave the blasted cat a none-too-friendly tap with his hook as he went by. He glanced through the boards as he walked down the hall to the dining room, but he already knew the parking lot would be empty. It would have been impossible not to know the girl was gone, the way Bonnie had been bleating after her.

The thought, uncharitable as it was, gave him no pang of guilt. He wasn’t heartless—well, technically, he was, but he wasn’t a stone-bastard. All the same, he was glad the girl was gone and not just because she’d had no bleeding business being here in the first place. 

Cheap shit, indeed. Like he had any say about the prizes that went into the Birthday Booty Chest.

When Foxy pulled the door to the dining room open on its protesting hinges, he caught the briefest glimpse of Bonnie seated on the edge of the main stage before he leapt up like, well, a bunny and came staggering two steps toward him, only to stop and slump on his feet.

“Oh,” said Bonnie sourly. “It’s you.”

“Aye, nice to s-s-see ye t-t-too,” Foxy said, letting the scowl that couldn’t show on his face come out in his voice. Looking around, seeing Chica in the kitchen doorway and Freddy in the back hall that led to the playgrounds, he added, “Who the hell else w-w-would it be?”

Static muttered through Bonnie’s speakers as he returned to the stage and sat, slumped forward with his elbows on his cracked thighs and his hands dangling between his knees.

Foxy rolled his eyes and went over to Freddy, who made room for him in the narrow hall, allowing Foxy to see that the barricade that had blocked off the door to the playground had been shifted and the door itself forced open so it would never latch again. “Bleeding hell, what-t-t did I tell ye?” he demanded disgustedly of the world at large.

“DON’T FIGHT,” Freddy warned, shuffling back so that Foxy, smaller and more agile, could get in and do the tricky work of reconstructing the barricade.

“I ain’t-t-t fighting. I just be observing Bonnie’s wee b-b-bit of fluff laid us open for her return trip, when she robs us blind-d-d.”

“Oh. Yeah. Like th-th-there’s so much here to s-st-steal,” Bonnie grumbled in the next room.

“Why else w-w-would she do it?” Foxy called, slamming a table into place against the door and wedging it into position with precise kicks. “Oh, right. T-To see ye.” He snorted, ignoring Freddy’s disapproving grunt. “Maybe next-t-t time, ye can take her somewhere besides the bloody maze, so I d-d-don’t have to listen to ye giggling each other up? Hell, there’s a couch in the back, ain’t there? Or—where else d-d-do the kids do their grubbing? Behind the prize c-c-counter? Back r-r-row of the theater?”

“How about the p-p-party room?”

Foxy stopped picking over the scrap and stayed perfectly still for however long it took to think, distinctly and without immediate emotion, ‘He did not just say that.’

“DON’T,” Freddy warned.

Foxy dropped the broken chair and wire rack he had in his hands and turned around.

Freddy stepped in front of him, eyes flashing. “THAT’S. ENOUGH.”

The command passed through him like an electric shock. Foxy fought it, for all the good fighting did; when Freddy said enough, it was enough, and flat ears and black eyes made no difference at all.

Freddy waited to make sure his order took—it always did, but he always waited anyway—then limped back out into the dining room. “IT’S. OVER,” he said, and somehow all his many sound-bites, no matter how spoken in the original format, came out growling. “SHE. CAME. SHE. LEFT. IT’S. OVER.” 

Bonnie did not argue or even look up, but his ears revolved and lay flat.

Freddy waited maybe half a minute and then let a few notes of the Toreador March deliberately drop. “WHAT DO WE SAY?” he prompted.

Bonnie raised his faceless head, looked directly into Foxy’s eyes with the whole of the dilapidated room between them, and said, “Fuck you.”

Foxy started forward. 

Freddy put out his arm without even bothering to look around and smacked Foxy unerringly in the chest. With his other hand, he pointed at Bonnie. “TRY AGAIN,” he suggested. “TRY HARDER.”

“Fuck-k-k you in the ear,” Bonnie amplified, lurching to his feet.

“Start th-thinking o’ what ye want t-t-to say to yer ass,” Foxy snarled. “In ab-b-bout ten seconds, yer head’s g-g-going to be up it.”

Freddy’s head turned all the way around. “I. SAID. ENOUGH.”

Watching anxiously from the kitchen doorway, Chica now tottered forward a few steps and reached out a peacemaking arm. “LET’S BE FRIENDS,” she urged.

Bonnie snapped around, his hands in fists, and even without eyecaps to make the dilation of his lenses obvious, Foxy knew if he wasn’t in the black already, he was right at the edge. At once, he backed away to let Freddy handle it, if handling became necessary.

But Chica’s own hands fluttered up and grabbed at the air where her beak ought to be. “I’M SORRY,” she said, her expression horrified and her tone cheerfully chagrined. “ACCIDENTS HAPPEN. I JUST CAN’T HELP MYSELF AROUND PIZZA.”

Bonnie’s stiff shoulders slumped and his ears drooped. “I know,” he sighed. “It’s ok-k-kay. It’s just…that’s all I c-c-c-could say. LET’S BE FRIENDS,” he said with sudden savage good cheer. “HI THERE! LET’S BE FRIENDS! Hyuck-hyuck, gawrsh! God d-d- _damn_ it!”

In spite of himself, Foxy felt a twinge of remorse. It wasn’t much, measured against the high-pressure mark of his retaliatory anger, but it was there. Scratching his hook along the side of his muzzle, he moved around Freddy and went over to sit on the edge of the show stage close to Bonnie’s original position and, after a long glare and one last grumble, Bonnie came back and sat beside him.

“She weren’t-t-t so bad,” Foxy said gruffly. “And I d-d-don’t suppose she’ll be b-b-back, so…for what it’s worth, it were kind of n-n-nice hearing someone laugh again, when it d-d-didn’t come with wrecking the p-p-place.”

Freddy grunted agreement and limped over to seat himself on Bonnie’s other side.

“And, look…ye d-d-don’t want to hear this, but th-this—THIS HERE BE PIRATE COVE—the best ending, ain’t it? Ye g-g-got yer one night with her…and she got t-t-to leave, thinking only the b-b-best of ye. What more could ye ask?”

There. He didn’t poke fun, he didn’t even drag up the little matter of Bonnie running around with her down in the maze again. He was perfectly well-behaved, and then Bonnie had to go and say, “I’m in l-l-love with her.”

“Oh for C-C-Christ’s sake,” Foxy snapped, smacking his metal hand to his forehead hard enough to crack the already cracked plastic. “Ye d-d-don’t even know her, ye bleeding ijit!”

“I know I’m love with-th-th her,” Bonnie said stubbornly, ears flat. 

“I’ll g-g-grant ye she were a fetching thing if ye have an eye fer rough t-tr-trade, but—”

Bonnie turned the black gape and pinpoint lights of his dilated lenses on him. “Don’t you t-t-talk about her like th-th-that.”

Ignoring Freddy’s censuring growl, Foxy leaned in and said, “—but the finest set o’ tits in the world s-s-st-still ain’t love.”

“FOXY.”

“Not everyone th-th-thinks with their dick,” Bonnie snapped.

“Ye are,” Foxy pointed out. “And ye d-d-don’t even have one.”

“THAT’S. ENOUGH,” said Freddy. “I. AM. NOT. DOING. THIS. ALL. NIGHT.”

“N-N-Neither am I.” Foxy got up and stomped back to the barricade in the back hall, saying, “T-T-Talk to him, Freddy! Tell him he’s an ass! He has t-t-to listen to ye!”

Freddy did say something, although as Foxy was flinging scrap around at his full strength and beating it into shape with foot and fist, he couldn’t make out more than the low rumble of Freddy’s voice rising and falling in what sure didn’t sound like a very reproachful manner. Foxy worked, determined not to care what was said or how as long as he didn’t have to listen to Bonnie’s silly romantic shit, and when he’d found a place for the last piece of the barricade and jammed it in, he turned around to find Chica in the short hall behind him.

She wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t even facing him. She was just standing there, like she was looking at the shadowbox where those stupid little toy mice forever kicked up their clockwork heels, but it almost didn’t even look like her, silhouette notwithstanding. All the life and energy that made her Chica was gone; in her place was nothing but an oversized toy in the shape of a chicken.

“Ye all r-r-right, lass?”

Her eyes shifted toward him, then back to the shadowbox. She shrugged, catching at one arm with the hand of the other and rubbing at her mostly denuded plastic casing.

She’d never talked about it, and lord knew, no one else was supposed to know, but there’d been a time, and not too damned long distant, she and Bonnie…

Foxy pretended to make adjustments to the barricade, but the quiet got louder the longer it dragged out. He didn’t know what to tell her. The obvious truth—that Bonnie would mope around like an ass for a day or two and get over it—seemed a bit cruel in light of certain facts to which he was not supposed to be privy. At length, and not without some internal cussing, he managed a terse, “I d-d-don’t see what he’s fussing over anyway. All t-t-tits and no brains, she was. Not t-t-to mention the sort what t-t-talks to animatronics. Probably higher-r-r than the damn moon.”

He could hear Chica clicking through sound files, but she must not have found what she wanted to say because in the end, she said nothing.

“Come on,” said Foxy, giving the barricade a last derisive kick before turning away. “Let’s g-g-go to the ar-r—ARRR!—cade and I’ll let ye whip me at the g-g-game o’ yer choice.”

He could see her heart wasn’t in it, but she nodded and waddled stiffly after him.

He was determined not to get sucked into Bonnie’s imaginary problems any more tonight, but as they were making their way across the room (Chica’s knees had been locked for years and her sensors were all dead from the waist down; she was too proud to ask for help, but on a wet floor, Foxy made sure to go slow and stay close, so she had his arm to grab at if she needed it), Freddy’s voice intruded with a resounding: “NO.”

“If!” Bonnie argued, static rising with the volume of his speakers. “You’ve g-g-got to g-g-give me this, Fr-Fr-Freddy! If! _If_ she c-c-comes b-b-b—BASAL PALISADING OVERCOME THROUGH MEANS OF—back, j-j-just let her—”

“NO,” Freddy said again, no louder, but with no leeway either. “I. LET. HER. STAY. AND. SHE. WOULD. NOT.” He paused, clicking, then decided on, “FOLLOW THE LEADER!”

“Come on! She j-j-just wanted to see the C-C—CHOROID PLEXUS INTACT—Cove! I kept-t-t her in the d-d-dining room the r-r-rest-t-t of the night!”

“THIS. MORNING.”

“You were th-th-the one who t-t-told her to wait-t-t outside!”

“OUTSIDE. NOT. THE. OFFICE.” Freddy’s brows scraped over his casing as he scowled the best he was able. “SHE. SHOULD. NOT. HAVE. BEEN. THERE. SHE. KNEW. BETTER. YOU. KNEW. BETTER.” Up came the pointing finger. “I. CAN’T. TRUST. YOU. TO. WATCH. HER.”

“She wasn’t-t-t doing-ing-ing anything!”

“THEN. WHY. WAS. SHE. THERE.” 

“She was j-j-just putting-ing the bags b-b-back!” 

Chica tugged at Foxy’s arm, making him realize he had stopped to watch and, if he were honest with himself, to watch with a peevish sense of satisfaction. Shaking his head, Foxy allowed Chica to pull him away from the soap opera unfolding on the stage, but he turned back again when Freddy said, “GOOD BOYS AND GIRLS DON’T TELL LIES. DID. SHE. LIE. TO. YOU. OR. ARE. YOU. LYING. TO. ME.”

But Bonnie seemed genuinely confused, as much as Freddy seemed to be certain. “What are you t-t-talking about?”

“SHE. TOOK. THEM. I. SAW. HER. PUT. THEM. IN. HER.” Freddy mimed something with mounting frustration, then said, “PURSE.”

Chica tugged at Foxy’s arm again, but this time, he would not be moved.

“Well…yeah, bu-b-b-but…”

“BUT. WHAT? SHE. PUT. THEM. IN. HER. PURSE. TO. TAKE. THEM. DOWN. THE. HALL. AND THEN. TAKE. THEM. OUT. AGAIN.” 

Bonnie couldn’t argue the absurdity, so he switched tracks and instead said, “There’s nothing b-b-back there! What-t-t do you th-think she was d-d-doing?”

Freddy grunted, then turned and stalked away, heading out by the East Hall.  
Now Chica was trying to pull him away in the other direction, but Foxy detached himself from her failing grip and went after Freddy, his ears up and spite taking the place of humor in his heart, to watch as Freddy tested every door and swept the lights of his eyes across every empty room, searching for the graffiti or damage or theft. When he reached the emergency exit at the rear of the building and found it still locked, there was nowhere else to go but into the security office.

Foxy watched from the doorway as Freddy tested the manager’s door, opened the desk drawers, then moved on to the break room, but about that time, Bonnie caught up to them. Foxy heard him coming and cleared the doorway, but Bonnie gave him a shove as he came through anyway, knocking Foxy into the dark window set in the wall between this office and that of the manager.

Something cracked.

Freddy stopped at once and came back, eyes lit and music tinkling merrily away, furious.

“It’s all right,” said Foxy, twisting his head around to inspect the new break on his back casing. “It was me.”

Freddy moved him aside and inspected the window anyway. It was undamaged, but there was a goodish piece missing from the frame. And that didn’t matter, since the frame was just dressing, like the fake wall that covered the real one, and if Bonnie were to rip the whole thing off, it wouldn’t mean anything. If the window broke, that might be something, but it was four solid inches of Lucite and probably wouldn’t so much as chip even if Bonnie had picked Foxy up and thrown him full force. It had been made to hold sharks, after all. 

It was holding something so much more dangerous now.

But _he_ was below and before he could even get at the window, he’d have to first open the magnetically-sealed door in the basement, crawl up the elevator shaft—no easy trick, that, not in that body—open the second magnetically-sealed door, break through the fake wall into the tungsten-carbide vault disguised as a manager’s office, and then either break this window or pry open a third magnetically-sealed door. No, _he_ was locked up, safe as houses, but Freddy had every reason in the world to be overcautious and if he wanted to tear into Bonnie over their scuffle, who was Foxy to stop him?

But Bonnie wasn’t looking at Freddy. He wasn’t looking at the window or the chipped frame around it. He wasn’t looking at Foxy’s freshly-cracked back casing.

He was looking at the cupboard.

And the cupboard door was ajar.

“WHAT?” Freddy asked after a moment. “WHAT. IS. IN. THERE.”

“Nothing,” said Bonnie, but faintly. “There’s n-n-nothing, just the…”

Quiet. It couldn’t be silent, not with all the unlubricated parts between them, but it was far too quiet for far too long.

“She c-c-closed it,” said Bonnie. “I know she closed-d-d it. I saw her…close it-t-t.”

And then he lurched forward, shoving Freddy this time, although he scarcely seemed aware of it. By the time Freddy had righted himself, Bonnie had torn open the cupboard door (the topmost hinge snapped free) and yanked the cardboard box nestled at the bottom out into the combined glow of their eyes; Bonnie’s own were too dark to give off light.

“No,” he said. He bent, fishing through the box for a few frenetic seconds before pulling kidshit out with both hands and throwing it all behind him. Sparkly headbands and plastic jewelry, well-loved stuffies and new ones from the gift shop that had never gone home with their young owners, baby bottles with desiccated formula on the insides, jackets and hats and booties and one young lady’s pair of ribbony panties (there was one in every crowd, wasn’t there?) went flying, until Bonnie was left slapping at an empty box. He turned it upside-down, shook it, then felt around inside it again, and then just stood there. 

A dingy yellow hand slipped around Foxy’s arm. He looked back, then stepped aside as Chica tottered in. She picked her way through the carnage of found and forgotten toys to Bonnie. She took the box. After a moment, his grip opened and he let her pull it from his slack hand. She dropped it indifferently behind her and hugged him, fearless as she ever was.

“She t-t-took it,” Bonnie said. He reached twitching fingers up over Chica’s head and gripped the broken edges of his face. “She took it-t-t.”

And even though Foxy had never until that moment guessed that Bonnie had even kept the damned things, he suddenly knew what the girl had stolen. 

“Why?” Bonnie was asking. “Why-y-y would-d-d she…? She knew…what-t-t it was. She said…I was st-st-still me. She s-s-said I was her…her m-m-man. Why would sh-sh-she d-d-do that?”

Chica hugged him tighter.

Freddy paced over to the break room again, then back and out the other side of the security office to rattle the emergency exit door, from there in one archway of the arcade and eventually out the other one, and away down the hall. 

A moment ago, Foxy would have cheerfully kicked Bonnie’s ass, but watching his heart get broken was too much. He scratched at his muzzle, feeling awkward and useless. And since anything he said was bound to be the wrong thing, he went ahead and said the worst thing right off: “It d-d-don’t make much difference, d-d-do it? Ye c-c-couldn’t ever fix yerself, so it ain’t-t-t like ye really l-l-l—LOST SOULS DOWN TO DAVY JONES—lost anything.”

Chica glared at him. Bonnie didn’t respond at all.

“Oi.” Foxy waited until Bonnie’s cameras shifted to him, then gestured with his hook at his own body—naked metal legs, slipped bands and cracked casing, and of course, the cavernous wounds across his chest, old even when this building were new, through which his internal mechanisms could be seen grinding and heaving. “It is what-t-t it is,” said Foxy. “We ar—ARR! ME HEARTIES!—are what we are.”

“No. No, _you_ are wh-wh-what you are. I’m th-th- _this_!” Without warning, Bonnie reached into his open head, snapped off a chunk of framework, and threw it.

Startled, Foxy made a grab for it, as he had last night when the girl had thrown the doubloon, but this was a smaller target and less predictable in its flight. It hit him in the shoulder, bounced off onto the desk, and from there onto the floor, but by then, more pieces were already flying, too many to even think of catching. 

“I’m this!” Bonnie shouted, straining to keep throwing pieces of himself around Chica, who held him and crooned one of the wordless lullabies for the quiet room. It was the best she could do.

And the best Foxy could do was stand and be a target until the storm of missiles subsided, so that was what he did.

“I’m th-th-this.” Bonnie groped once more at the side of his head, but let his hand drop without breaking off a last shard. “I’m…”

Chica held him, humming, until at last he slumped against her and let himself be held.

Freddy was coming back. His approach was relatively quiet, which was a good indicator of the return of his self-control. Wiring the Toreador March into Freddy’s kill-command had been one of his little jokes. Over the years, Freddy had worn away at the softer edges of the programming that triggered its hated tinkling tune, but it still piped up whenever he started to lose his temper. The angrier he got, the harder it was for him to shut it off, so the fact that Foxy heard nothing but the thump and drag of his footsteps was encouraging.

But although Freddy might be quiet, he was not calm. The cameras behind his eyecaps whined as they irised bigger and smaller, and his voice when he spoke was underscored by too much bass, giving him a bearish growl as he boomed, “DID. SHE. TAKE. ANYTHING. ELSE.”

“No!” Bonnie’s faceless indignation faltered. “I…I d-d-don’t know. I didn’t-t-t see, but…” His ears drooped. His voice dropped to a scratch through his speakers. “She…shut-t-t me off.”

Foxy didn’t even have time to react before Freddy had bulled him aside, seizing Chica and Bonnie each in one huge hand and pulling them apart. Chica he merely held—even on the edge of the black, Freddy was mindful of her frailties—but Bonnie, he gave a damned good shake. “WHEN? WHERE?”

“I d-d-don’t know! I didn’t-t-t think she meant-t-t to do it! She just-t-t reached and…and I thought-t-t she caught my chest-t-t wrong. She p-p-p—PUPILLARY LIGHT RESPONSE INDICATIVE OF—pulled and I th-th-thought…It was j-j-just for a minute, Fr-Freddy! I thought-t-t it was a mist-t-take.”

Freddy’s gaze dropped from the cavity of Bonnie’s head to his chest, as if searching for telltale fingerprints and maybe he even found some, because next he released Chica to grip Bonnie by the jaw, forcibly tipping Bonnie’s head back. Not even Freddy could open Bonnie’s chest-panel, but by moving the loose debris inside Bonnie’s head, he could see through it to the chamber below. Foxy glimpsed the dull gleam of Freddy’s eye-lights shining on Bonnie’s endoskeleton, but only briefly, because in the next moment, Freddy’s eyes went full black for the first time in years.

“WHAT’S WRONG, FREDDY?” Chica asked.

Freddy did not answer, but the Toreador March began to play. It skipped and stuttered as Freddy stood motionless—a bad sign in itself—but then he quit fighting it and let it play, and that was worse.

“What-t-t?” asked Bonnie. “What d-d-did she do?”

The March played on.

“P-P-Please,” said Bonnie. “Please, j-j-just tell me.”

“SHE. DREW. ON. YOU.”

“What-t-t?”

“SHE,” said Freddy, his voice slowly but steadily being swallowed by static, “DREW. ON. YOU.” 

“I d-d-don’t…She would-d-dn’t…No…What-t-t?”

Still holding Bonnie’s jaw, Freddy released Bonnie’s arm and touched one finger to the front of his chest casing, sketching what seemed to be a short series of points, up and down. Not many. Perhaps they were supposed to be the nearby mountain peaks or, considering its placement, perhaps an ironic representation of a heartbeat. Maybe it was meant to be a joke. 

Freddy wasn’t laughing. Freddy’s eyes were still black and the Toreador March was the only sound he made.

Bonnie had gone very still and quiet again, but when Chica moved toward him, he seemed to shake himself out of it. “Look again,” he said with a sense of calm that was nothing short of shocking, all things considered.

“SHE. DREW—”

“It’s not-t-t a tag, Freddy. They’re let-let—LET’S BE FRIENDS!—letters. What-t-t do they say? Read th-th-them.” Bonnie reached his trembling hands up and peeled back the silicone flap of his mouth and all the debris time had sealed to it, doing all he could to open the field of vision. “Read them t-t-to me.”

Frowning, Freddy closed his eyes, took a quiet minute to himself, then opened them with the lenses back to normal and shone their light into Bonnie.

His chest glowed purple, with scratches of dirty luminescence around the seams.

“A,” said Freddy at length. “N. A.” His head tipped this way and that, then shook slowly back and forth. “THAT’S. ALL.” He stepped back, his eyes in flux, but still calm for the moment. “DOES. THAT. MEAN. SOMETHING. TO. YOU.”

“Yeah.” Still clutching at the broken pieces inside his head with one hand, Bonnie lowered the other to grip at his chest-plate. His knees, never too steady, buckled; he staggered back until he bumped the wall and let it shore him up. “It’s her n-n-name. She wrote her name on my heart-t-t.”

Foxy had never heard anything more stupid in his life or been less tempted to roll his eyes at hearing it.

“Leave m-m-me alone.” Bonnie’s legs shook. He collapsed, letting the wall guide him down until he hit the floor with a sickening crunch of cracking plastic (the floor itself made next to no sound at all; the basement was made to withstand the best beating an animatronic could give). His head bent. His arms crossed over his chest and his fingers, where the plastic had eroded open to the metal bones, scraped against his casing as if he were trying to reach through and pull the girl’s signature out like stitches. “L-L-L—LEFT ANTERIOR LOBE—Leave me alone.”

Chica waddled forward, but Freddy put a hand on her shoulder to halt her, and after a long, anguished stare, she let him turn her around and nudge her out the door. Foxy followed her, taking a place close beside her in case she needed support. She did, but not that kind; she took his hook like it was a hand she could hold, and when they reached the signpost at the intersection, she turned and threw her arms around him.

He patted her back awkwardly, his ears rotating backwards as he strained to hear voices behind him. He heard only Freddy’s footsteps and the whining of his cameras as his eyes fluxed into and out of the black.

When Freddy reached them, he at first just kept walking, but stopped after only a few more steps and stood facing the wall. Foxy realized there was a poster there, rotted away to tatters, but still recognizably Bonnie’s face, giving the viewer a heavy-lidded sidelong grin that was just a hair too grown-up for a kid’s place. Funny, the things you can live with so long and just…just stop seeing.

Freddy stared at it for a long time in almost-silence. Then he said, “IF. SHE. COMES. BACK. I. WANT. TO. KNOW.”

“Aye,” said Foxy, but although Chica nodded, she said, “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO—”

“KILL. HER.” Freddy’s head turned just enough to show the pin-point light in the socket of one eye. “I’M. GOING. TO. K-K-KILL. HER.”

“Aye,” Foxy said again, patting Chica’s back.

She pulled away from him, tapping her fingertips together in her long-ingrained gesture of reluctance and concern. “ARE YOU SURE THAT’S HOW THE SONG GOES?”

Freddy looked back at the poster for a second, then turned all the way around and pointed at Chica. “IF. SHE. COMES. BACK. YOU. TELL. ME. THAT’S AN ORDER.”

Chica fought it, twitching and clicking, but had to nod. Freddy was the leader. Rule Twenty-Nine made his orders law. All the same, she said, “WE ALL DO BAD THINGS SOMETIMES, BUT IT HELPS TO SAY I’M SORRY.”

“I. DON’T. CARE. IF. SHE’S. SORRY.” Freddy’s pointing hand swung fast, now pointing down the back hall as his eye-bulbs blazed and flashed, musical notes dropping like acid here and there among his words. “I. DON’T. CARE. IF. HE. FORGIVES. HER. I. BROUGHT. HER. IN. TO. MY. HOUSE. I. GAVE. HER. SHELTER. AND. SHE. HURT. HIM. SHE. HURT. HIM.” Freddy’s eyes fluxed full-black for one second, no more, but it was a very bad second and a very long one. When they irised small again, Freddy let his arm drop. He breathed, after a fashion, air cycling in and out, but there was a growl in the sound that came from nothing but rage. Quietly, not calmly, Freddy said, “NO. ONE. F-F-FUCKS. WITH. MY. FAMILY.” 

Chica twitched, shivered, and said nothing.

Freddy eyed her for a moment more, then grunted and walked away. The first tinkling notes of the Toreador March began to play, shuddered to a stop, started up again, and violently stopped with the sound of a huge fist smashing into the tiled wall.

In the quiet, in the dark, Chica took Foxy’s hook again and this time, pulled it around her shoulders. She twitched.

“It’ll be all r-r-right, lass,” he told her and meant it. Either the girl would be satisfied with her stolen trophy and stay away, or she’d come back and die. One way or the other, everything would be all right. But it bothered him and he found himself wishing—he, who was years past caring what happened to the trespassers who unwisely came to Freddy’s—that she would stay away.  
 


	9. Chapter 9

# CHAPTER NINE

Ana did not waste time. Upon completing her first walkthrough—crawlthrough—of the house, she unpacked her things onto the porch and turned the trailer in at the U-Haul lot in Hurricane. While she was there, she dropped in at the outlet store mall and bought some essential items—a collapsible clothesline tree and a bag of pins, a foldaway chair, a solar-heated camp shower, a battery-powered lantern and a couple cheap LED flashlights, a propane stove and Dutch oven. After some debate, she also caved in and bought a tent, but didn’t set it up yet. Although the rain had not returned with the same force as had greeted her on her first night back in Mammon, it hadn’t dried out either. The house was in no condition to be occupied and, for now, the ground was wet and the porch was rotten. The boxes containing her life could sit under the sagging eaves and risk collapse—they were replaceable—while Ana slept in her truck, telling herself that it would only be for a few days.

But the gears of government grind slowly. Ana knew this and believed she was prepared to deal with the inevitable delays in a rational and adult manner. What she failed to take into consideration was that, in this case, she was not watching the gears turn, but was caught up in them. Their many teeth were hooked and sharp; with each day, she was only pulled in deeper.

Paying the vultures off was the easiest part, so that was what she did first, but if she was naïve enough to think that would somehow get the ball rolling on the rest of it, she was soon corrected. The Department of Waste and Sanitation would not rent a dump trailer to her until the driveway had been repaired. The gravel guy would not deliver the materials until the brush was cut back. She could not throw the brush out without a dump trailer and could not burn it without a permit. She spent three days trying to get Mammon’s fire department to talk to her before someone told her to talk to the county fire people instead. They told her they couldn’t deal with her over the phone, so she had to make the drive out to St. George and wait around for two hours before someone told her they needed proof of residence, and apparently, her fucking _title_ did not count. She needed a piece of mail, posted through the system, from a utility or the city, not a business or a private citizen. So back she went to Mammon to try and get the power or the water or something turned on at the house so she could start collecting bills, to be told that wasn’t going to happen until the house could pass a fire code inspection, which meant it had to be empty and repaired, which meant hauling all the crap out of it, which meant renting a dump trailer, and so it went on, _ad nauseum, ad infinitum_.

Day followed night followed day. Phone calls were made. Appointments were kept. The gears turned, pressing Ana and the house together into finer and finer powder, but no progress was made. She did what she could on her own—hacking at the branches and saplings choking out the driveway when the weather permitted and hauling truck-loads of crap all the way to the landfill in Washington when it didn’t.

To make matters worse, all the driving back and forth was chipping away at her much-depleted financial resources. Before the first week was out, it had become brilliantly clear to her that she was going to have to get a job and she’d better do it sooner rather than later, because hiring opportunities were scarce enough without throwing her tits and tattoos into the mix.

So the house shifted to the back burner and Ana Stark went job hunting. 

As she was sitting in a corner booth at Gallifrey’s, drinking coffee and circling the least objectionable possibilities in the Want Ad section of the Mammon Monitor (where Looking For Works outnumbered the Help Wanteds roughly ten to one), Ana became aware first of the heavy stride/radio chatter/jingling metal sound that together meant ‘cop’ approaching her. She did not look up. The bathrooms were back this way, after all. No sense getting paranoid until she had a reason.

“Morning,” said a man’s voice.

Ana sighed into her cup, then set her coffee down, checked her watch and looked up. “Sheriff Zabrinsky. Have a seat.”

He slid into the padded bench opposite her, his brows raised. “You have the advantage of me.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Ana signaled Lucy Gallifrey for service.

“Mind if I ask how it is you know my name?”

“It’s on your shirt,” said Ana, nodding toward it.

He looked down.

Lucy brought more coffee and another cup for the sheriff, then made herself scarce again.

“So,” said Ana.

“So,” he agreed.

They drank their coffees.

“You going to introduce yourself at all?” he inquired, picking up the plastic card of specials and frowning at the pancakes.

“You going to pretend you need an introduction?”

“Well, when you put it like that.” He replaced the card and picked up his coffee again, seemingly just to have something over which to give her an imposing stare. “You’re the Blaylock kid.”

Ana’s brows twitched up.

“You’re surprised I know who you are,” he said with a thin smile.

“Actually, I’m surprised you don’t. I’m Ana Stark. Marion Blaylock was my aunt.”

He nodded. “And Melanie Blaylock was your mother.”

“Melanie Stark.”

“Oh, I suppose _she_ can be counted a Stark by marriage, but I don’t know that you’ve got any claim to the name.” 

Ana looked at her watch again. “Two minutes,” she said. 

“Is that how much time you’re giving me to come to the point?” he asked, smiling again.

“Nope. That’s how long you waited before calling me a bastard. I’ll give you all the time you need to get to the point,” she went on as his smile wiped itself away. “I’ve got nowhere else to be. But if you’re waiting for me to flip the table and storm out of here just because someone takes a cheap shot at my mother, you’ve got a long wait coming.”

He studied her as she went back to reading the Want Ads.

Lucy came by to freshen their coffee.

The people at the next table paid and left. 

“You going to ask after Joe?” he asked.

“Nope.” Ana circled a listing for a yardwork laborer, but didn’t star it. She had a truck, but not much in the way of equipment, not even a lawnmower, and odds were good they’d expect her to bring her own toys to the party.

“Why not?”

“Why should I? More to the point, why do you care if I do or not?”

“Just seems a bit on the strange side, you being back in town almost a week by now and haven’t looked him up.”

“Uh huh. Is he dead?”

The sheriff leaned back in the booth. “Why would you say that?” he asked after a moment.

“I can’t think of any other reason you’d want me to ask about him, except to be able to spring that on me like—” _A spider_. Ana paused, trying to chase down that oddly specific, intensely disturbing image, then let it go with a shrug. “—a fake snake out of a prank can of peanuts.”

“You don’t seem too broken up by the thought.”

“Should I be? I never knew him. I don’t think I ever met him, or if I did, I sure don’t remember. He divorced my mom when she was pregnant, kicked her to the curb, and never paid a cent of child support, so yeah, I don’t feel a real pressing need to send flowers. Is he, though?”

“Yes, he is.”

Funny. She actually felt something. Nothing much, just a twinge, maybe only at the thought that she was an orphan now, with all the Dickensian imagery that word embodied. Orphan. Alone in the world. She had nothing and no one. No family. No home. No job.

She circled another ad, this one in building and construction, knowing damn well they’d never take on an unlicensed carpenter or electrician. Orphan. Huh.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Coroner says it was suicide.”

“You don’t agree?”

Silence.

Ana glanced up to find the sheriff frowning at her with that coppish frown so exclusive to the breed.

“Why would you say that?” he asked again.

“Because if you did, you’d have just said ‘suicide,’ not, ‘coroner says.’” Ana gave him a moment to think that over, then said, “What happened?”

The sheriff shrugged too casually for the narrow way he was watching her now. “He had a trailer parked out at the canyon. Illegally, I might add. About ten years ago, he took it into his head to jump.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Starting to sound like a broken record here, but why would you ask?”

“My mom used to talk about the house she got kicked out of when she was pregnant with me.” The house she blamed Ana for losing. “I know the terms of the divorce didn’t include selling it or splitting it, so he went from owning a house in town to living in a trailer at the edge of the canyon. Something went wrong there.”

“S’Like having coffee with Sherlock Holmes,” the sheriff remarked, studying her with an expression of practiced neutrality. “Yes, he was a drinker. And yes, he had some in him that night.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance he just forgot where the edge was and walked off looking for a place to piss?”

“I don’t believe it and neither did the county Doc. May I ask why, if the man himself didn’t matter s’much to you, you’re taking such an interest in the circumstances of his demise?”

“You wouldn’t have brought it up unless there was something you thought was pretty damn interesting yourself.”

“There is, since you mention it. The body was found quite a ways out into the canyon. Coroner says—and this part, I do agree with—he couldn’t have gotten there just slipping off the end. He had to jump and moreover, he had to take a running jump. He damn near had to do an Olympic long-jump. I’d have said he was hit by a car and thrown, except the vehicle itself would have either had to go over with him or left some pretty distinct tire tracks and there were none.”

“So he jumped.”

“Seems that way.”

“And yet, you don’t believe it was a suicide.”

“I have a little trouble with the idea, yes, ma’am.”

“Your reason being?”

“Well, it’s a cop-thing, you understand. You know much about suicides?”

Did he know about her mother? The careful way he was looking at her made her think he did, but if he thought she was going to let him pull that out of the past and lay it on the table, he was dead wrong.

“I know it’s cowardly,” said Ana. “And I suppose it’s not fashionable these days to have this sort of opinion, but I have a hell of a hard time feeling sympathy for people who make that kind of mess for other people to find and clean up.”

The sheriff’s expression flickered toward a grudging sort of approval before masking itself again. “As far as that goes, I suppose I can’t disagree, but I was referring more to the mindset of a suicide.”

“Then, no, I don’t.”

“Let me tell you something about suicides, then. In my experience, there’s two kinds: the kind that know they’re suicides and the kind that don’t. The kind that don’t are the ones who do themselves in with too much drinking, too many drugs, driving too fast, going home with the wrong men, doing the extreme sports and such. Risky behaviors, is what I mean to say. They may never admit to themselves out loud that they’re unhappy or that they’re trying to die, but they’re doing everything under the sun to get out from under their life, short of putting a gun in their mouth. Those folks would be shocked and probably mad as hell if someone told them they were acting suicidal. That’s how much they choose not to see it.”

“That’s the kind you’re saying my father was.”

“I’m saying if Joe Stark was suicidal at all, that’s the kind he would have been. To that, I would add that the kind of mindset that hurls themselves fifty feet out into Mammon Canyon with less than a beer’s worth of courage usually belongs to the second sort, which is the sort that knows they’re suicidal and more often than not has a few attempts under their belt before they succeed. They got bathroom cabinets full of anti-depressants and a therapist who knows them by name. These are the folks who have made a plan for the big day and have a couple back-up contingencies if the first don’t go off like they hoped it would. They settle their affairs. They write a note. At the very least, they are survived by people who may be saddened, but not very surprised when they get the news. Now, I’ll grant you no one around here was much saddened by Joe Stark’s passing,” the sheriff said, leaning back in the booth, “but we were very much surprised. This is a small community. Not a lot of secrets here stay buried.”

That he could say that with a straight face strained Ana’s temper, but she managed not to inquire how the case of her missing aunt was going. Or her missing cousin. Or, for that matter, the long-cold case of one small girl whose mother had beat, starved, shut up in a closet and on one occasion hit her with a fucking car in front of more than a dozen witnesses who then went on to do spectacularly nothing. No secrets in a small town. Right.

The sheriff shrugged at her silence and drank some more coffee. “Still, something else you learn being a cop is you never really know someone, and I knew him less than most. Having said that, I have to confess, I was surprised to read the coroner’s verdict. See, in addition to the body being found as it was, there was the matter of the trailer.”

“Signs of a struggle?”

“I should say so. Door was damn near tore off, frame was bent, floor looked like someone went at it with a sledgehammer. Place was wrecked, like a hurricane blew through the insides. However, as was pointed out to me when I made these observations, that trailer had seen some hard use and Joe’s personal habits left a lot to be desired under any case. The only thing that really stood out to all of us…” He paused to take a long drink of what had to be pretty cold coffee, then waved the waitress over to top him off. His eye wandered out the window as Lucy poured. “S’really coming down, isn’t it?” 

“It’s March,” said Ana, returning her attention to her Want Ads.

“Looking for work?”

“Why? You hiring?”

He chuckled into his cup and did not bother even to tell her no.

A few minutes passed.

“Well, I guess I’ve taken up enough of your time,” he said at length, giving the lure on his hook an enticing jiggle.

“Thanks for stopping by,” said Ana, turning a page of her newspaper. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

He slid out of the booth and stood.

She sipped her coffee.

He waited.

She read.

He walked away.

She found a listing for a housekeeper at the Sugartree Motel and tapped it twice, but did not circle it. The taste of turning beds after years honing her skills at construction was too bitter to swallow. She told herself it was honest work and she couldn’t afford pride, but still didn’t circle the listing. Give it another month. She might be hungrier then.

He came back and sat down again.

“Forget your keys?” Ana asked without looking up.

“You mind answering me a question, just for laughs?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Where were you on the night of September 17th, 2003?”

Ana laughed and the sheriff laughed with her. 

“Holy shit,” she said, wiping her eyes and grinning with amazement at honest-to-God tears of laughter. “That’s awesome. That is legit Columbo right there. Let’s see…2003, September…” Ana scratched a hand over her hair, stirring up memory. “I was at a place called the Little Feet Ranch in Springwood, Montana. I don’t have the phone number on me, but I could get it to you this afternoon if you need it.”

“I’m sure that’s not necessary, but since you offer, please do.”

“Now tell me what the hell you found in that trailer that made you, even for a second, consider me a viable suspect for…how did you just put it? Hurling a full-grown man fifty feet out into Mammon Canyon?”

“Oh, I promise you, I never did. Not really. But that’s cop-think for you. We don’t have the luxury of assumption. We have to explore avenues that make no logical sense.”

“See, I would understand that better if I benefitted at all from my father’s death, but I don’t.”

“Not like you did from your aunt’s,” the sheriff agreed.

Ana still smiled, but the feeling behind it was no longer a warm one. “Yeah. Really scored with that, didn’t I? But back to my father’s trailer…?”

The sheriff shrugged, watching her closely. “I asked around some, after his death, and I never found a single soul in the whole of this town who could recall Joe Stark ever mentioning you, excepting, I suppose, in an indirect way as being a consequence of his wife stepping out on him. He never mentioned you by name that I’m aware of. He may not have even known it. And yet, the last thing he did before jumping fifty feet off the edge of the canyon was Google you and your mother.”

“So…you’re suggesting what? That I drove a couple hundred miles in a single night, hulked out on my dad’s trailer, threw him in the canyon, Googled myself, maybe took a selfie before I updated my status on Facebook—oh, 2003, right. Updated my status on Myspace. ‘My first murder, lol!’ And then left the incriminating page up before I took off, drove a couple hundred miles back to Montana with no one the wiser—and let me tell you, I was one of eight women on that ranch and the only one between the ages of six and sixty apart from the boss’s wife. They noticed every time I took a piss; they’d have noticed a six-hour absence. And then what? Waited ten years before coming back to reap the full benefits of my devious plan to…?” She spread her hands, inviting suggestions.

The sheriff did not seem overly concerned with supplying them. “Motives are one of those things that matter more on TV than real life,” he told her. “In my experience, real criminals are pretty dumb. Just like real murderers are rarely strangers. But that’s neither here nor there, is it? Joe Stark committed suicide.” 

Once more, he slid out of the booth and stood to go. This time, he made it almost to the door before he turned around and came back.

“You know, s’funny you should mention Myspace,” he said, leaning up against the back of the bench where he had been sitting. 

“Is it? How so?”

“You didn’t have a Myspace page in 2003.”

“Still don’t,” Ana said affably. “Of course, it’s 2015 now. Who the hell does, am I right?”

“You’re not on Facebook either.”

“Or Twitter, for that matter. I don’t blog, don’t Snapchat, don’t pin my interests or tumble whatever the heck Tumblr tumbles apart from porn.” Ana shrugged around another swallow of coffee. “I’m not a social media kind of girl.”

“I’m sure that was very frustrating to whoever was trying to find you. Still. I’m sure he’s given up by now. And just because I know you’re back doesn’t necessarily mean he knows.” He touched the brim of his hat. “Have a nice day, Miss Blaylock.” 

“So long, Sheriff Zabrinsky.”

Ana watched him go, waiting for him to turn and come back to drop ‘one more thing’ on her. Even after she saw his black-and-white drive away, she kept watching the door. She was not convinced she’d seen the last of him until Lucy Gallifrey came by with the ticket.

She’d charged her for the cop’s coffee.

Ana laughed again—you had to laugh, didn’t you?—threw down a five, took her paper, and went out into the rain.

# * * *

Over the next week, Ana circled twenty-two advertisements in her effort to find honest employment. Ten of those leads ended at the phone call stage, either because the position was no longer available or because they were looking for someone more qualified. The other twelve ads allowed her to apply online, which resulted in four rejections and eight interviews. Of those, she was turned down immediately upon walking into the office five times (but only one of them told her to turn her tits around and stop wasting his time, which was a refreshing sign of the progressive times), and encouraged to seek employment elsewhere the rest of the time. She was told a pretty girl like her could make decent tips waiting tables at Gallifrey’s if she kept her tattoos covered and got rid of the crazy-eyes contacts. She was told to ask around at church and see if anyone was looking for a babysitter. She was told Hurricane had a Lowe’s if she really wanted to work around tools and even offered classes so she could learn how to use them around the house. 

At the last interview, she was given the address for Shelton Contractors and told, with a badly-smothered smirk, to just drop by. Old Shelly was always running behind schedule and looking for help, she was assured. Day labor, for the most part, but they’d be coming into summer soon, the busiest time of year, and Shelly did all the contracted city work in Mammon.

Ana knew damned well she was being played, but she also knew the old shoebox was half-empty, so she thanked the asshole, took the address, and drove over.

Her GPS brought her to a smallish lot in front of a squat, sage-colored building with a few cars and a dozen or so heavy work rigs around the side; the bulldozer, backhoe, cherry-picker, trencher and paver had all seen a lot of recent use, which was an encouraging sign that she might not be wasting her time after all. 

Walking through the front door brought her into a tiny reception area consisting of a tall counter facing a short row of plastic-backed, unpadded chairs, and a coffee machine, presently empty and unwashed. The walls had been painted white once and never again touched; its only decorations were work- and pay-related notices, a calendar of the sort given out free every Christmas by an insurance company, half a dozen photographs of various men posing with dead deer, and a much-used dartboard to which had been affixed an Obama campaign poster. The floor was bare concrete, although a small stained square of carpet had been duct-taped down in front of the counter. There were two doors set in the rear wall, both unmarked, and as Ana approached the counter in the hopes of finding a bell or something, one of them opened.

The man with his hand on the latch was in his mid-fifties, sun-chapped and heavy-built, with the solid spare tire that came from spending the first half of one’s life doing hard work and the latter half directing it. The calluses on his hands were stained and cracked. The hair on his head was bullet-grey; his mustache, nicotine-yellow. His pale eyes moved over her with idle interest, lingering in the predictable places, but not very long. He came to the counter and leaned up against it. “Help you?”

Ana introduced herself and gave him an abridged version of her reasons for dropping by. To his credit, he listened, restricting his comments to the relatively benign, “Villart, that jackass,” when she got to the part about who sent her.

“You a lesbian?” he asked when she came to the end of it. 

“Nope, just ugly shoes.”

He nodded, looking her steel-toed boots over, then shrugged and said, “I got nothing against lesbians, in case you were getting the wrong idea. However, I’m not looking to hire at the moment. I can appreciate the fact that you came out in person and all, but there it is.”

Ana had no real disappointment to swallow. She turned around, managed one step toward the door, and then, without planning to, she turned back. “I know I was sent here as part of some prank and I’m trying like hell to have a sense of humor, but as much as you might think the joke’s on you, it isn’t. It’s all on me. Because I have years of experience doing what I do and I do it goddamn well. You give me three hundred bucks and three days, I could make even this place look like someone competent works here.”

The man looked around the front office and back at her.

“No, the joke here is that I may end up working as a goddamn waitress or a housekeeper and for no other reason than because the narrow-minded pricks in this God-fearing toilet of a town think that’s the only work a woman ought to do, assuming they let her put shoes on and leave the kitchen long enough to even have a job.”

“Now you just hold up one minute there, missy,” he said, hitching at his belt as he came around the counter. “You got no call to walk in cold off the street and insult my hometown—”

“This is my hometown too,” she broke in. “I grew up not ten blocks from this spot! Although with every day and every inbred, misogynistic asshole I have to deal with, I’m more and more grateful I got out!”

The profanity blew over and around him; he frowned, studying her face now and not just the front of her shirt. “Stark, did you say?”

“Yeah,” she said tightly. 

“Any relation to Joe Stark?”

She laughed, high and sharp as shards of glass. “Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Let’s just say I’m Melanie Stark’s kid and leave it at that.”

“That’s right,” he said, ignoring the silent challenge underlying her words as he looked her over again. “Mellie. I should have got that soon as you walked in. It was your hair that threw me. All that hair.”

Somewhat unpinned, Ana glanced up at the dark blur of her hair, as best she could see it framing her face, and scowled uncertainly back at him.

“And your eyes. Shouldn’t wear them wild contacts. Makes you seem unsavory.”

“They’re not contacts,” Ana snapped. “Those are my damn eyes. God, I ought to _start_ wearing the stupid things, as many times as I have to say that.”

“But the rest of you is all Blaylock. Cheeks…chin…lips. Was always her best feature, Mellie’s lips,” he went on, peering at them. “That’s a sad thing to have to say about a woman. If she’d just smiled more, made some effort…still, she got around just fine without smiling. Oh yes. Mellie did get around.”

Ana checked her watch. 

“Now her sister! She was pretty all the way down to the bone. When she was younger, she could stop traffic, that’s how pretty.”

“You know they were identical twins, right? They had exactly the same looks.”

“Well, it’s what you do with what you got, isn’t it? I told her once, I said she should have run off to Hollywood and been in movies. She just laughed and said she’d rather be making ‘em. That was Marion. Her and her cameras.” His gaze drifted off to some indistinct spot on the dingy wall and stayed there maybe a minute. “I think I may remember you,” he said at last. “Used to see you and Marion’s boy together an awful lot. More than I’d let my daughter chum around with a boy, but I suppose you were young. ‘Course, they’re starting younger and younger these days.” His eyes came back to her, to all of her, and his lips thinned. “So you’re back.”

“For now.”

“You staying?”

“God forbid.”

“Well, you might want to think about how many of the troubles you’re having fitting in here just might be of your own making, little miss. Just because a man didn’t hand you a job on a silver platter doesn’t mean you got any call at all to question his beliefs. For your information, I absolutely believe in a woman’s right to work outside her husband’s home. If she wants to be a teacher or a lawyer or a pilot, I got no beef with that. None. If a lady did all the same schooling and work it took to become a doctor, then she ought to be paid just as much as a real one. I’m not a racist. Hell, I got nothing against the _idea_ of a lady carpenter. If that was all I did here, I’d give you a fair shake without a moment’s hesitation. My only problem is, I am running a business here, not carrying around a soapbox for feminist principles. The men on my crew are not dedicated this-and-thats, they are general labor. That means they need a broad skillset that covers everything I need them to do in a day’s work. When I got a wall that needs to go up, I need to be able to point at the first man I see and say, ‘Put that wall up,’ and walk away, knowing that job will get done without another man having to come over and do the heavy lifting.”

Ana stomped over and found a pad of paper and a pencil on his cluttered countertop. “This is my last boss,” she told him, writing out one of Rider’s clean numbers. “You call him and ask him how many walls I put up for him. Ask him how many floors I’ve put down and roofs I’ve replaced. Ask him about the garages I’ve converted to apartments, complete with kitchens and bathrooms. Ask him about the houses I’ve rewired. And then ask him how many men have to do my heavy lifting.”

The man took the pad, glanced at it, and tossed it aside. “I’m not calling out-of-state,” he said dismissively.

Ana pulled out her phone and held it out.

He did not take it. “Second thing is,” he said, just like he were continuing an argument and not drumming up a new one, “My crew needs to be able to work without distractions and, through no fault of their own, they all got thousands of years of evolution telling them to look at a lady’s rump when it goes wiggling by in tight jeans. Now,” he said, holding up both hands with an indulgent chuckle, “I’m not saying that’s fair or right or anything of the sort. I’m saying that’s the way God made ‘em and that’s the way it is. I have a schedule here. I can’t have them slowing down and I can’t have you up in my office every day complaining about it every time a man’s eyes dip a little south of the chin-line.”

“I’ve been doing this kind of work half my life,” Ana said. “A little eye-fucking isn’t going to bother me, as long as they keep their hands to themselves.”

“You say that now, but then I hire you and next thing I know, I got lawyers in here hollering about harassment. Now, I’m not saying you’re one of them, but I will say there’s a lot of ladies in the world who’ve found out it’s quicker and easier to make their money ruining a good man’s reputation rather than working. I won’t have that happen to one of my crew and the best way to make sure it don’t happen is not to risk it.”

“Whatever, man.” Shaking her head, Ana headed yet again for the door.

“But I tell you what…”

She rolled her eyes where he couldn’t see it, then braced herself and looked back.

“This is a small town. We take care of our own. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. You’re going to write down your name and phone number for me—” He tore the page with Rider’s number on it off, crumpling it in his fist as he passed the pad and pencil back to her. “—and I’ll keep it on file here. I’ve got a busy summer schedule coming up and it’s possible I’m going to need some extra help before too long, someone to answer phones, make appointments, handle invoices and lading—”

“Make the coffee,” Ana guessed.

“—and keep the place clean,” he concluded. “And before you get your panties in a bunch talking about how I’m calling that woman’s work, all that I just said is work I’m doing right now. So you want to think twice before you get up on your soapbox saying it’s beneath you. If it’s not beneath a man, it sure isn’t beneath a woman.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Ana after a long, self-censuring moment of reflection. She took the pencil and gave the man her number.

He accepted it with a stern, judicious stare and tucked it away in his shirt pocket. “All right, then. Little advice for you, missy. You get what you go looking for in life. You go around expecting every man you meet to be patronizing and racist, that’s how you’re going to see them, even when they’re doing nothing but giving you a little friendly attention. So take the chip off your shoulder. And smile,” he added, walking her to the door so he could hold it open for her. “You’d be prettier with a smile. Maybe if you got a compliment now and then, you’d have a more positive outlook on life.”

# * * *

That night, lying in the truck bed with her head pillowed on her day pack, staring up at the top of the camper shell as the rain beat down, Ana decided to call Rider. She told herself it was just to let him know he might be getting some calls from prospective employers wanting to check her references, but when she asked how many of these he had already received, seeing as she’d been giving his number out for a while already, she was not surprised when he said none.

“Figures,” she said morosely.

“Mormons giving you trouble?” Rider inquired. The sound of his zippo striking came through the phone and Ana rolled over at once so she could open her pack and get at her weed. It was only polite. She knew how much he hated to smoke alone.

“No,” she said, pulling bottles of not-vitamins out one at time and lining them up against the wall of the truck bed. “Haven’t you heard? It’s the sin they hate. They love the sinner.”

“You want a little advice?”

She snorted. “You’ll be prettier if you smile?”

“I do feel pretty when I smile,” he reflected. “But no. My advice to you is, don’t take it home with you. Them monkeys can climb all over you, screeching and flinging their shit around, but at the end of the day, darlin’, you _can_ just go home and wash it off.”

“Is this your way of telling me to come home?”

“No. This is me telling you it ain’t your circus and they ain’t your monkeys.” 

“Hm.” Ana’s questing hand touched the corner of something hard and plastic. The lunchbox she’d taken from Freddy’s. She pulled it out into the light of her lantern and sure enough, that was what it was. A cartoon version of Bonnie grinned up at her from the front, one eye dropped in a wink. _Dear Playbunny_ , he seemed to be saying.

She smiled.

“But since you bring it up…”

“No,” said Ana, putting the lunchbox aside and going back into her pack. She brought out the big bag of weed with the little bag of papers inside it and settled back to roll herself a smoke. “I came here to do a job and Ana Stark does not leave a job until it’s done. They want to fuck with me, fine, but they are going to find out in a hurry that I am straight-up hentai and I am going to be tentacles-deep in their collective schoolgirl asses by the end, so they better lube up now.”

Rider let out one of those coughing laughs that meant she’d caught him mid-inhale with that one. “God, I miss you.”

Ana lit up, pulled in a calming lungful, and thought of Bonnie, waiting by the window every night for her return. He might have even seen her truck go by a few times. It was too easy to imagine his ears going up and how his leg would drag as he limped over to the door next to Tux, eager to open it for her…only to watch the truck keep going…up the hill…around the corner…out of sight…and back Bonnie would go down the hall to the place where the boards didn’t quite meet, watching the road.

“You there?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You’re being awfully quiet.”

“Yeah.”

He smoked. She smoked. The phone faithfully charged her for each second of silence.

“Do me a favor, darlin’,” Rider said.

“Sure. What?”

“Want you to tell me to fuck off.”

“Fuck off, Rider,” she replied obediently. “Why?”

“Just wanted to get that out of the way so it don’t clutter up what I’m about to say next. How much money you got left?”

She opened her mouth to tell him to fuck off, then smiled. “Well played.”

“Hey, I ain’t where I am today because I’m stupid. How much?”

“I don’t know.” She glanced to the corner of the truck bed where the shoebox sat, but felt too comfortable to pull it over and count it. “Enough to get by for a few months.”

“And work on your aunt’s house?”

“Sure, if I could get to the fucking house, but that’s the joke, isn’t it? I can’t start working until I’ve done all this other stuff first and the city’s been out to check off their little boxes, all of which takes money and time. I’ve been running circles around this town, shitting cash in all directions with fuck-all to show for it, and now if the gravel guy were to show up tomorrow, I couldn’t even fucking afford to pay him. Hence the job thing. Fuck,” she said as a new thought occurred to her. “How long does it even take to afford to resurface a driveway on a waitress’s salary anyway? Let’s see, that’s standard width for a quarter-mile, say seventeen-sixty, plus the lot, call it an even two thousand cubic yards, and I’m going to need to reshape and crown the whole fucking thing, literally from the ground up. That means renting a tractor, scraper and grader at the very fucking least. Even if I do it all myself, I don’t see me laying down less than thirty grand, and that’s the cheap shit, the pea gravel mix, not the nice glittery, like, crushed marble or whatever is out there now. And that’s just the top layer! The fucking icing! I am going to need ten fucking inches at the very fucking least of foundation rock, with a layer of geotextile mesh underneath that to bed it and keep the silt out or it won’t drain for shit.”

“Fuck yeah, you do. Got to have good drainage.”

“Fucking silt,” Ana grumbled, pulling the lunchbox over and fumbling the tabs open so she could look inside. Bonnie’s face, an unrecognizable mix of pale lilac, lavender-grey and sage-flower purple, like so many chunks of tinted gravel. “So that’s what now? Forty-five? Fifty? Which is so far outside my budget, it might as well be a fucking million. How the hell do poor people live?” she demanded in frustration. “How do they even, you know? How do you just wake up one morning and say, ‘Today, I’m going to settle for plain pea gravel when I resurface the driveway,’ because they’ve only got fifty thousand dollars?”

“I don’t know, darlin’,” Rider said with a sleepy smile in his voice. “I really don’t.”

“I can’t believe this is so fucking impossible. I’ve made more than fifty grand in a day. In a single, literal day.”

“Doing what?” he asked pointedly.

“That’s not important. The important thing is, I worked hard so that if I wanted to resurface my driveway, I could damn well throw down and get the gravel I wanted! Now look at me. I can’t even afford to be poor.”

“No, you just can’t afford to be honest. I got some colleagues out that way, you know. I could make a few phone calls, hook you up with some short-term work for a decent chunk of coin. Nothing too labor-intensive or time-consuming. Maybe all you got to do is hold some stuff, you know? Make deliveries.”

“I can’t, Rider. I’m way too fucking visible. The fucking sheriff sat down in my booth last week when I was having breakfast. What am I supposed to do about that?”

“Eat at home.”

“The kitchen is ten feet deep in, like, I don’t even know. Ass-less chaps and melon ballers, most likely. I don’t understand this,” she sighed, knuckling through the plastic shapes for the paler pieces that made up his muzzle until she found one with a straight, rounded edge. His lip-line. “You have no idea what it’s like here. The worst episode of Hoarders ever cannot begin to equal the way my aunt was living _for years_.” She found another straight-edged piece, tried and failed to match the two together, and kept looking. “She’s got to be here, Rider. I look at this house and I can’t imagine, can _not_ imagine, that she’s not under this. Every single bag of trash I pick up, I think I’m going to see her rat-chewed hand under it, and when I don’t, it’s not relief, you know? Because it just means she’s under the _next_ bag or the _next_ box. There’s no way she’s not here. There’s no way I won’t find her.”

“Better you than the bank.”

“Yeah.” She had found more pieces of Bonnie’s muzzle than she could hold now. Stretching the sleeping bag over her lap into a more or less flat surface, she began to lay them all out. This took both hands, which meant she had to put out her joint. “I guess you’re right, but it’s hard.”

“Who told you it was supposed to be easy?”

Ana made a face, matched two pieces of plastic and started hunting out a third.

“Look, I got to sex this bitch up. She’s giving me dirty looks. Yeah, I see you, don’t act like you ain’t. You want me to make those phone calls for you?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself, darlin’. Offer stands. You change your mind, let me know. In the meantime, let me give you a little more advice, from a guy who’s bought and sold a hundred houses and dealt with the bureaucratic shitheads in dozens of tiny towns along the way. When you start running low on funds, you got to put your money where it can do the most for you, and that ain’t always the house. You hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“But do you understand me?” 

“I think so.”

“Good. Do what you got to do and come home.” With that, Rider hung up. He’d never been one for goodbyes.

And neither was Ana. She moved the phone aside, dumped out the lunchbox and passed several minutes sorting Bonnie’s muzzle out from his face and head. When she had the pieces laid out before her, she picked out all the pieces of his upper lip and tested them together, one by one by one, until she had the whole thing, end to end. 

Then she scooped everything together and dumped them back in the lunchbox. Pointless doing this without glue.

She found her half-smoked joint, considered finishing it, then just put it back in the bag and shoved it all into the corner with the rest of her stash. She shut off her lantern, lay down, laced her hands behind her head, and stared open-eyed into the dark.

Tomorrow, she would head out and pick up a couple nickel-ads from St. George and Hurricane. Expand her employment possibilities. Wear her loosest jeans and her longest sleeves. See if she could find a cheap set of color contacts; they sold them at gas stations these days. And stop at the Lowes on the way home to pick up some superglue. She had a million other things she could be doing instead of the jigsaw puzzle that was Bonnie’s face, so she’d better get that out of the way first.

She fell into an agreeable little fantasy in which she returned to Freddy’s. In her mind’s eye, it was not the crumbling ruin she knew damned well was waiting for her at Edge of Nowhere, but the pizzeria as she’d seen it a thousand times in Aunt Easter’s tapes, with posters on the walls and party hats on all the tables, except that she was the only one there, and when Bonnie came to the door to let her in, they had the whole place to themselves. Maybe this time, they’d clear a path into the gym and they could make out a little on the carousel, hiding from Freddy and singing _If You’ll Be My Man_ and tasting Death in each other’s kisses until the sun came up and he went back to normal.

‘Idiot,’ Ana told herself with a smile, rolling onto her side and closing her eyes. ‘He’s already back to normal. He’s reset himself a dozen times since that night. He’s forgotten all about Mia Rose and he’s forgotten all about me.’

So thinking, she slipped off to sleep as, just a few miles away, Bonnie wandered for the fourth time that night into the West Hall to stand at the place where the boards did not quite meet and stare out at the empty road.


	10. Chapter 10

# CHAPTER TEN

Ana’s chat with Rider clarified things. In the morning, she made the drive back to the county fire people, got the permit guy in an office with a door on it, and point-blank asked him how many tickets to the fireman’s ball she’d have to buy to make a burn permit happen. St. George was practically a bustling metropolis compared to Mammon, but this was quite possibly the first bribe the poor man had ever been offered. Nonetheless, after some initial sputtering, he bore up like a champ and set a price, and that afternoon, Ana was burning the first of the three massive brush piles she had accumulated since her arrival. It was a calm day for March and it took three hours for someone to notice the column of smoke rising up over Coldslip Mountain, but when good old Sheriff Zabrinsky showed up, Ana had copies of her permits ready and coffee brewing on the camp-stove so she could fill his thermos before she sent his ass back down the road.

Once she had cleared the entire length of the driveway all the way to Old Quarry Road, she paid a visit to the Department of Waste and Sanitation. At first, the woman in charge of rentals was adamant that the lane be resurfaced before a trailer could be delivered, but after Ana pointed out that she had been billed by the city for several years’ worth of property maintenance and if they had not, in fact, been maintaining it, that sounded a lot like fraud. “Now I could pay a lawyer at this point,” she had concluded, “or I could buy a ticket to the garbageman’s ball. Which way do you want it?” 

Within a short time, an agreement was reached that both parties found amenable. Friday morning, there was a thirty-foot dump trailer in front of the house. Friday evening, it was full.

As no one would be available to exchange it until the following Thursday, Ana was back to making smaller haul-aways in her own truck, but after taking three loads of clothes to Mammon’s charity donation drop-off, she was told they couldn’t accept any more until they had sorted through it. There were plenty of other churches in the neighboring towns, not to mention the Goodwill in Hurricane, but that was too much driving for too little progress, so Ana guessed she was done for now.

She never had known what to do with herself when she had nothing to do, but as bad as that was, having plenty to do and no means of doing it was worse. There was no point in pulling shit out of the house if she couldn’t haul it away, and no hope of starting renovations until the shit was gone. That left her with more yardwork, of which there was plenty, but it was raining again, which made the work, if not impossible, at least unpleasant enough that she could tell herself it was impossible and sort of believe it. Also, it was by this time Sunday, so the job search was on hold, since the only doors open in Mammon on Sundays were hung on the churches.

Ana passed the time under the shell in the back of her truck, stripping the fragments of Bonnie’s face down to the bare plastic and then gluing them together by the light of her lantern. She slept that night in the cab of the truck, since the back was full of fumes, but come Monday morning, Bonnie’s face and muzzle were more or less restored, somewhat less than more. She gave them another coat of shellac, set them on some boxes in the basement to dry, and drove out to Hurricane to turn in the last round of applications, pick up the next one, and peruse the Lowes hardware aisle. 

Back in Mammon, she had lunch at Gallifrey’s and then walked across the lot to the mall, but its doors were shut and locked. So were the doors of the laundromat that shared this lot, and the appliance store and the nail salon.

It surprised her, although she didn’t know why. A few dead businesses were only to be expected in a city of any size, and she’d been led to expect so much worse by the debt guy’s warning that Mammon was…how did he put it? One tumbleweed away from a western movie? She’d assumed he just wasn’t used to the creepy quiet of a truly small town when she’d returned to find Mammon more or less how she’d left it, but now she had to wonder if the reason she hadn’t been able to find a job was that there genuinely were none. She had yet to see a For Sale sign on anyone’s front lawn or boards over any window apart from Freddy’s, all the streets were neat and clean and there were fresh flowers in the decorative pots that hung from the lamps in the downtown block, but as Ana walked back across the mall’s parking lot, it occurred to her that it really was too quiet here. 

When she reached her truck, she kept right on walking, past the diner to the intersection and straight across against the light. No one honked their horns at her; no one was there to be inconvenienced by her jaywalking. At the next block, she looked in at the Mammon Canyon Marketplace, counting cars. Three. At noon on a Monday, three cars in the only grocery store in town, and for all she knew, they belonged to the employees. One person pumping gas at the only gas station. No one at all going into the post office. Three young ladies and seven small children having a picnic on the grass at the Duckling Day Care. One elderly couple walking each other out of the pharmacy. No one standing at Mammon Canyon Credit Union’s only ATM, no one waiting at the window, no one standing inside at the counter apart from the tellers.

She walked to the parks, all three of them; she saw ducks in the water and squirrels in the trees, but no people. She reacquainted herself with each of Mammon’s many, many museums; all empty apart from the seniors taking donation money and one very small classroom’s worth of eight-year-olds learning about mining. She met no other pedestrians, had to stop for only one car, was passed by maybe a dozen others.

She walked all the way to the bridge and stopped, leaning up against the high pedestrian rails as she watched the river glitter far below in the canyon. She wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but she could feel thoughts like the severed arms of octopi squirming, gripping onto whatever they bumped into but disconnected from any mind. When at last she turned around, there was Freddy on the first billboard, showing her his fangs as he loomed over a scrapbook of the town with half the pictures painted out.

She got home at a quarter to six to discover the wind had blown the cover on the dump trailer loose and quite a few of the lighter items had come out and were lying around the yard. Once she got that taken care of and the cover tied back down, she’d decided it was time to think about dinner. Her grocery box was looking a bit thin and she was sick of crackers and tuna, so she took out a can of soup. Steak and potato. She ate it cold, thought about rolling herself a joint, then remembered Bonnie’s face in the basement. Although it was getting dark and she was already feeling worn around the edges, once the idea of Freddy’s had arisen, there was no getting rid of it. She still had no idea how she was going to reattach the damn thing, but hell, she wasn’t going to figure it out from here.

Ana took a flashlight and climbed down into the basement. She got turned around briefly, misremembering where she’d put the pieces of Bonnie’s face earlier that morning, but soon found them over on the stairs. Picking through the nearest heap of clothes, she shook out a couple hideous Christmas sweaters thick enough to provide some padding, and wrapped each piece. She placed them into her day pack, arranging her clothes and junk around them in another protective layer, then located an empty toolbox and loaded up, grinning to herself at how excited she knew she was. This was bound to be the riskiest and most frustrating fix she’d ever attempted, but it felt more like she was going to hang out with a friend.

The temptation to hurry, just throw things together and go, was strong, but Ana made herself go slow, check and double-check, stop and think about each potential problem and how she’d need to address it. As a result, it was nearly nine and full dark before she found herself climbing the steep access road onto the cracked lot surrounding Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria.

This time, she parked next to the side door rather than slither through the barricade into the foyer, only to find that at some point between then and now, someone had threaded the chain back through the push-bar and found something to tie it to inside, locking her out again. While the obvious culprit was a security guard or even a cop, Ana could not shake the notion that it had been Freddy himself, and when she walked all the way to the Out door and discovered a couple of chair legs stabbed into the barricade’s track-line, she considered her suspicions confirmed. 

The chair legs were hammered in damned deep, all the way through the track and into the wall itself, but although it was awkward to work the prybar through the smallish links of the barricade, it wasn’t impossible. Once she had them out, she tried to lift the barricade, only to find it would raise no more than an inch at most.

Puzzled, Ana hunkered down to have a closer look and saw that the bottom of the track had been pulled up from the wall, bent through the bottom rung of the barricade, and twisted back together with the track mooring. 

No security guard had done that.

Ana left her pack and toolbox by the doors and went back to the truck, returning a minute later with the jack. The barricade withstood her efforts maybe thirty seconds before it buckled and thirty seconds after that, she was creeping in on her hands and tiptoes, doing her very best not to wallow in the wet mud that covered the foyer floor this time.

Someone—gee, she wondered who—had smashed some more of the gift shop window and scattered the glass over the countertop, but she swept it aside with her pack and crawled in anyway. “What else you got for me, Freddy?” she asked cheerfully, just before she looked down and saw she was about to land on top of a chunk of sheetrock studded through with sharpened metal shards.

It gave her pause, but wasn’t much of an obstacle. Ana let herself down, nudged it aside with her boot and picked her way across the gift shop, making damn sure her foot never made contact with anything but the bare floor. She found two more ‘bear traps’ before she reached the dining room—another shard-studded piece of wood hidden in a rotting pile of plushies and a scattering of glass that, in all honesty, might have been there for years—but once she was out of the gift shop, the way was clear.

“Hello?” Ana swept her phone’s light across the stage, but it was empty. “Anyone home?”

A metallic rattle in the kitchen, as of pizza trays being shifted, followed by footsteps. Ana turned her light that way and Chica raised her arm, not in a wave, but to shield her eyes. Ana lowered the beam of her light.

“Sorry,” she said. “Is Bonnie around? I’ve got—”

“RUN.”

Ana blinked. “What?”

Chica’s upraised arm spasmed and her head rocked back on her thin neck. She righted herself, more or less, her fingers still tremoring in one hand, and said, “RUN-N-N AND PLAY. RUN AND P-P-PLAY. HEY RUMBLE! HEY T-T-TUMBLE! SOMETIMES IT JUST-T-T FEELS GOOD-D-D TO RUN RUN RUN…AND PLAY.” She shook again, her arm snapping out and smacking hard into the doorway. One of her few surviving plastic wing-feathers broke off and dropped to the floor.

Ana put her toolbox and pack down on the table that had been her bed’s canopy the last time she was here (the garbage bags that had been her mattress were still there; ripples of scum showing where rainwater had seeped in, collected, and evaporated away) and went over to pick the lost feather up. 

She knew right away there was no reattaching it. When she took Chica’s hand and turned it to get a better look at the underside of her arm, she could see a whole row of jagged stumps where other feathers had snapped off. She could also see deep cracks in her plastic skin, exposing grimy metal bones and clots of time-blackened machine grease. The smell wafting out of her was putrid, so much worse than she remembered Bonnie being, as if something had crawled inside poor Chica and died.

“You okay?” Ana asked. 

Chica looked at her, her paint-flecked eyelids heavy over her eyes, giving her a weary, sorrowing stare. “WE ALL DO BAD THINGS SOMETIMES,” she said. “BUT IT HELPS…IT HELPS…IT HELPS TO SAY I’M SORRY.” Then she walked off down the hall, laughing to herself and saying, “IT’S TIME TO EAT! HEY, FREDDY! COME AND SEE! WE’VE GOT A BIRTHDAY GIRL! LET’S EAT!”

Okay, well, never mind. If Bonnie didn’t turn up on his own in a few minutes, she’d go find him. This place was big, but hardly infinite.

Ana went back to the table and brought out her lantern, which did a fair job of showing her just how hopeless this place was, in case she’d forgotten. She turned it all the way up anyway, holding it over her head as she tried to determine the best place to work. There weren’t a lot of bests left in this place, so that was what she was still doing when the door to the West Hall behind her banged open and Bonnie lurched through it.

He saw her and froze, one arm and both ears twitching. “It’s you,” he said.

“It’s me,” she agreed, setting her lamp down. “Miss me?”

“What-t-t are you d-d-do—DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS, KIDS?—doing-ing here? You-You-You…Why d-d-did you…”

His head cocked as if listening. A moment later, Ana heard it too: the tinkling, playful sound of music well back in the hall. Several bored nights haunting old cartoon clips on YouTube had led her to its name—the Toreador March, from, of all things, an opera called Carmen. Pretty much every cartoon ever made that set itself in Mexico sampled something from that opera, usually the March. She hummed along for a bar or two as it drew louder, nearer, and Bonnie twitched again and looked at her. The lights where his eyes should be flickered as the cameras there irised open and shut, as if with uncertainty. “You’ve g-g-got to g-get-t-t out—OUTSIDE WHEN THE WEATHER IS—out of here.”

“Yeah, yeah. The restaurant’s closed, I remember.”

“No, th-th-that’s not…” He limped in the direction of the East Hall, where the music was growing steadily louder, then turned back to her as fast as he could turn, which wasn’t, very. “G-G-Go. Get-t-t out of here. N-N-Now.” 

“What’s the matter, Bon?” she asked. “You don’t look very happy to see me.”

“I’m not-t-t.”

That stung. “What the hell, man?” she asked, trying to laugh it off. “I thought we were friends.”

“Yeah. So d-d-did I.” He started toward her, his ears rotating back and lying flat as he came. “You m-m-made me think a lot-t-t of thing-ing-ings that night-t-t and th-th-then you t-t-t-took—” A hard spasm interrupted him. He grabbed at his lower jaw to steady it as he shivered, still trying to talk. “You t-t-t-too—TO THE EXTRAPYRAMIDIAL TRACT—you t-t-took my—MYELINATION ARTIFICIALLY INDUCED—damn it! It d-d-doesn’t matter, j-just-t-t-t go!”

“But I didn’t take anything. Oh wait, you mean this?” Ana opened her pack and brought out his lunchbox.

Bonnie’s cameras locked onto it. He went silent, except for the hum and click of his internal parts, and still, except for the sporadic tics and tremors glitching through him. 

“I wasn’t going to keep it,” said Ana, setting the lunchbox on the table. “I didn’t even mean to keep it this long, but I had a lot going on and, you know, priorities.”

Slowly, Bonnie let go of his jaw and lowered his arms. He took one step, then another, then limped the rest of the way across the room. He looked at her, then at the lunchbox, and as she removed the two sections of his face and began to unwrap their protective sweaters, he picked it up, only to slam it down immediately with a startling bang. “Where is it?”

“Jesus! Right here, keep your ears on!” Ana held up the larger piece, the one with his reconstructed eye-sockets and the sculpted round peaks of his cheeks, edged all around in the deeper color of his head and body just as Chica finally came into the room from the hall, with Freddy in tow. 

Freddy’s gaze went straight to Bonnie’s face and the music accompanying him stuttered and died. He looked at Ana—in that first moment, his eyes seemed to be dark sockets with only tiny points of silvery light at their centers, but it must have been a trick of her peripheral vision, because when she looked at him, his eyes were normal—then at Bonnie. “WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE?” he asked heartily.

Bonnie did not speak or move or look around. 

Freddy grunted, glanced at Chica and held up his arm in an obvious stay-here gesture, but shuffled closer himself, his head cocked and eyes narrowed.

“ARE YOU OKAY?” Chica called. “WHAT’S GOING ON, GUYS? HI, BONNIE! HI, BONNIE! WHAT TIME IS IT? ARE YOU HUNGRY? LET’S EAT!”

“Well?” prompted Ana, since Bonnie was only standing there. Did he even recognize himself? She shook his muzzle free of the restraining arm of its sweater and held it up in front of the other piece so he could see both of them together.

He still did not react. 

“The nose wasn’t in the lunchbox,” she apologized. “I had to improvise and I warn you right now, I am not a fabricator. It’s just a hacky-sack, painted black and kind of smooshed down. So…yeah.”

No response from Bonnie.

Across the room, Chica tapped her fingertips together and said, “IT’S SO GREAT TO SEE YOU!”

Freddy looked at her, then at Ana. His answering grunt was more of a growl. Otherwise, he did nothing.

“I know it looks weird without the fuzz,” she said, rubbing the now-smooth plastic surface of his muzzle. “It was getting everywhere and fucking up the glue, so I just took it all off. I’d have put it back, but I don’t know how to flock, even if I knew where to get some. That’s me, you know. If you’ve got the parts, I can slap ‘em together, but when it comes to arts and crafts, I haven’t got the first fucking clue.” She waited, watching him with an uneasy frown as he continued to just stand there. “So,” she pressed. “What do you think?”

Nothing from Bonnie, nothing but the click and hum of his internal parts. Waiting for her to say something he could react to, Ana supposed, so she thought and said, “I made it just for you!” in her best Chica-impersonation.

At once, Chica clicked hard and said, “THE SECRET INGREDIANT IS PEANUT BUTTER,” but Bonnie still didn’t say anything. His hand rose in twitches, like the ticking of a clock-hand, and lowered again without ever touching either his face or his muzzle. 

“You f-f-fixed it,” he said in a static-filled whisper.

“Not quite,” she admitted, shining the penlight over the more obvious patches. “It’ll never be as good as new. I mean, I got all the pieces you had, but obviously, that wasn’t all the pieces you lost. I filled in what I could, hence the crappy patchwork job I made of it, but you’re going to have a hell of a hole up at the top of your head. However, it ought to hold together just fine.” She flipped it over to show him the gridwork of metal tape supporting the back, then gave it a careful tap or two on the table to demonstrate its stability. “What I lack in fabrication skills, I more than make up for in bottles of shellac.”

He finally took his face from her and stood holding it in both hands, just staring at it.

“I’m not sure how to do this,” she told him, eyeing what she could see of the surviving framework within the cavity of his head, “but it looks like I can procrastinate for a few more hours at least. I have sorely underestimated the amount of work I have to do first. Are you up for it, my man?”

His cameras hummed as he focused on her again. “Up for what-t-t-t?”

Ana opened her toolbox. One by one, she laid out the heavy-gauge wire, coils of metal tape, and assorted pins, joints, springs and bands she’d be using to reconstruct his internal scaffolding and hopefully get all his moving parts moving again. 

Bonnie reached out as if to take the bag of aluminum rods she’d just set down, but he never quite touched it. “You’re g-g-going to f-f-fix me-e-e- _eeeee_ —fix me?”

“Fix may be too strong a word,” she admitted. “I don’t suppose you’ve got an operator’s manual around here someplace I could flip through?” Seeing his blank expression—and nothing did blank like a faceless rabbit with cameras for eyes—she tried again. “Troubleshooting guide? Schematics? Anything?”

“No, not-t-t here.”

“Hmm.”

“Does…D-D-Does that mean…?”

“JUST DO YOUR BEST,” Chica said and ducked her head when Freddy looked at her. “YOU’LL NEVER KNOW UNLESS YOU TRY.”

“Oh, we’re still doing this,” Ana agreed. “I’m sure I can figure you out. You’re just, you know, a fully interactive, walking, talking robot. How complicated could it be?” 

It was a joke. None of them laughed. 

“Freddy, you’re smarter than the average animatronic bear. Got any advice?”

Freddy did not reply, but he did start walking. He didn’t talk, didn’t laugh, didn’t start up any routines, just walked while Bonnie and Chica watched him. He came around the table, his plastic eyes dropping to assess her tools, and continued on behind her. Where he stopped. And stood.

He loomed over her shoulder, too close, but if the grind and wheeze of his internal parts was distracting, the light of his eyes proved useful as she held Bonnie’s face up to the cavity of his head and tried to think.

How _was_ she going to mount it? All this last week, she’d been telling herself his endoskeleton was fine like it was the only thing that mattered, but now she was faced with the knowledge that Bonnie needed his internal framework back in place before his face would even go on, and she couldn’t fuck that up or else his eyes wouldn’t shut, his mouth wouldn’t close and his muzzle wouldn’t move. That part of her that could slap up houses and fix broken toasters remained confident, but the rest of her knew she’d only get one chance. This was not a wall she could tear down and have another bash at; this was not a toaster she could toss out and replace; this was Bonnie and he was counting on her to do it right.

“Okay,” she muttered, looking through the empty holes where his eyes should be at the cameras sunk in his head. “Okay, I can do this, but it’s not going to be quick and it probably won’t be pretty. You trust me, my man?”

His ears twitched up and drooped slowly back. “I th-th-thought…” His cameras irised smaller and smaller, until the lights in them could not be seen at all. “St-Still your man, huh?” 

“Still a bad, bad world. I guess as long as that’s true, you’ll always be my man.” Ana winked at him, still sorting out parts. “Every bunny needs some bunny to love.”

It was a line from one of his songs, but although he clicked and his guitar-playing arm twitched, he didn’t start singing. “I’m s-s-s-so sorry,” he said instead, which came out of nowhere and was doubly startling for the way he said it. It wasn’t the teaching-kids-good-moral-lessons tone she’d always heard him use when one of his playacted routines came with an apology. His cameras wouldn’t meet her eyes; his ears were low; his shoulders slumped. He looked, even faceless, unhappy and ashamed. “Yeah, I…I t-t-trust you, Ana.”

Color her triple-surprised.

“You found it.”

He nodded, silent, still staring away at the wall behind the stage. 

She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She’d never intended him to see her name and especially didn’t want anyone else to see it. That was the whole point of writing it inside his chest cavity instead of, whatever, drawing a big goofy heart right on his casing and putting some dumbass A + B 4EVER in the middle. She wasn’t carving some teenage declaration of love into a tree, she was writing her name on his heart. It was supposed to be secret, special. No one else was supposed to know.

Ana glanced over at Chica, who, through the magic of emotional projection, looked just as awkward and self-conscious as she felt, and as she did so, Bonnie’s ears sagged lower, like he knew he’d done something wrong.

Not that he had. He wasn’t, after all, a tree. It was his heart; he could show it to whoever he wanted.

“It’s okay,” said Ana and tried to sound like she meant it. She still wasn’t sure she did, but she knew she couldn’t get hung up on it all night. She had work to do. “Hey. Hey, look at me.”

He did, but not right away.

She stood on her toes to put her eyes on level with his cameras. “You’re very handsome when you smile,” she whispered. “Can you smile for me, my man?”

His cameras hummed as the lenses irised.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just like that.”

Air wicked through him, just like he took a breath, and fans blew it out through all his joints. 

She dropped back on her heels and offered Freddy a smile, since he was still there, right behind her, and watching all this through narrow eyes. “What about you, big bear? You trust me?”

“I’M FREDDY FAZBEAR,” he informed her in a friendly voice at odds with his unforgiving expression. “NO.”

“Please, Freddy,” Bonnie began, but stopped when Freddy held up one hand.

“THE RESTAURANT IS CLOSED. YOU ARE TRESPASSING. YOU NEED TO LEAVE.” He grumbled briefly through his speakers, then thrust out his microphone. “AFTER.”

It took her a second to understand what he wanted. Ana took his microphone and gave him her cell phone. He scowled into its light, then turned a completely different look on Bonnie. His huge hand closed over Bonnie’s shoulder, patted once, and then he stepped back, holding the cell phone up and aiming its light into Bonnie’s head. 

Ana dug into her bag for the penlight she kept for detail-work, calling, “Chica, can you give me a hand?”

The next sound she heard was stuttering, plastic applause.

“How many times am I going to walk into that?” sighed Ana, rolling her eyes. 

“GOSH, I’M SORRY,” said Chica, clutching her hands as if to keep them from doing it again. “I JUST CAN’T HELP MYSELF AROUND PIZZA.”

“It’s ok-k-kay. Th-Th-That will n-never not-t-t be funny,” said Bonnie, looking over at her, and Freddy grunted again, managing somehow to smile at Chica while scowling at Ana.

Chica tapped her fingertips together, shrugged her wings, and came a little closer. “I LIKE TO HELP MY FRIENDS.”

Ana glanced at Freddy (so did Bonnie, she saw), waiting for him to again inform the room at large that she was not their friend, but he restrained himself. For now.

“Okay then,” she said, now opening her toolbox and reaching for the wipes. “Let’s get this show started!”

All three of the animatronics made a synchronous clicking sound, very loud. Chica and Bonnie turned and headed for the stage. Freddy merely jerked hard, then looked at her.

“Whoops,” she said with a sheepish shrug. “Sorry, I forgot that’s what you used to say to get the band on stage.”

“THAT’S ME!” called Chica, apparently being introduced to all the empty tables in this empty room. “IS EVERYONE HAVING FUN?”

Silence, filling the space where cheers should go, broken now only by the steady clicking and the ragged sound of servos straining as Bonnie collected his guitar and took his place on the left side of the stage. “THAT’S RIGHT-T-T!” he said, jerking around to address the empty place where Freddy should be standing. “HERE AT FREDDY FAZBEAR’S, FUN IS ALWAYS ON THE MENU.”

“Sorry,” Ana said again. “Can you stop?”

“I THOUGHT PIZZA WAS ON THE MENU,” said Chica, cocking her head and touching one finger to the side of the gaping hole where her beak should be. “I LOVE PIZZA!”

“You can’t, can you?” 

“NO,” growled Freddy, shooting her just one hell of a glare as he limped toward the stage. “BONNIE. LOOK AT ME. DON’T FIGHT.”

Bonnie spat static, then jerked again, his entire upper body stuttering back like a man having a seizure. “I KN-KNOW YOU D-D-D-DO, CHICA,” he spat, ears jittering, flat to his plastic skull. “TH-TH-THAT’S WHY I WROTE A P-P-P-PIZZA SONG, JUST FOR YOU!”

“DON’T FIGHT,” said Freddy again, heaving himself up the steps one at a time. “LET. IT.” He clicked, growling, and said, “HAPPY.”

“YOU DID?” Chica clapped her hands. “CAN I HEAR IT?”

“Y-Y-YOU BET!” said Bonnie. “F-Fr-Freddy, make it-t-t s-s-st-st—ONE! TWO! A’ONE TWO THREE FOUR!” He started strumming hard on his stringless guitar. “ _PIZZA! PIZZA! IT’S MY FAVORITE FOOD!_ ”

“MINE, TOO!” inserted Chica. 

“ _THIN CRUST! THICK CRUST! EVERY WAY IS GOOD!_ ”

“That doesn’t quite rhyme,” said Ana. 

Freddy swung around to glare at her, gripping Bonnie’s shoulders as Bonnie sang, “ _ROLLING OUT THE DOUGH OR TOSS IT IN THE AIR! ANYWAY YOU MAKE IT, JUST MAKE ENOUGH TO SHARE!_ ”

“I WILL!” 

“ _TOP IT OFF WITH SAUCE! COVER IT WITH CHEESE! MUSHROOMS, PEPPERS, SAUSAGE—EVERYTHING BUT ANCHOVIES!_ ”

“YUCK!”

Well, whatever. Ana got a grip on the edge of the table and started lugging it over to the stage, tools, parts, pack and all. The noise was tremendous, adding a heavy-metal flair to an otherwise predictable gush of praise for pizza, although to judge by Bonnie’s fingering, the song already came with plenty of thrash. Not enough to make her wish she could hear the tune that went with those lyrics, but enough to make her wish his guitar still had strings.

When the song thankfully ended, the three of them held their last positions for a few seconds, then all snapped out of it together. Freddy released Bonnie and stepped back, giving Ana another of those blameful stares, just like he hadn’t sung those silly songs a million times. Chica shook her head as if to clear it of lingering notes. Bonnie threw his guitar on the padded floor of the stage and clenched his empty fists a few times before looking at her. 

“Not c-c-cool,” he said blackly.

“I said I was sorry.” Ana started to climb onto the stage with him, but she’d only just put a knee up when Freddy’s foot slammed down in front of her.

“HOLD ON THERE, LITTLE FRIEND!” he said in a hearty voice belied by his angrily slanted eyes. “ONLY BAND MEMBERS ARE ALLOWED ONSTAGE!”

“I need to—” she began, pointing toward Bonnie.

“ONLY BAND MEMBERS ARE ALLOWED ONSTAGE!”

“I just—”

“THE ANIMATRONICS CAN BE DANGEROUS. FOR YOUR SAFETY, STAY OFF THE STAGE.” Freddy bent, bigger than a real bear and just as full of teeth, and said/snarled, “DON’T. MAKE. ME. TELL. YOU. AGAIN.”

Ana withdrew and stepped back.

Freddy straightened, still glaring, and grunted.

“THAT WAS A GREAT SONG, BONNIE,” said Chica, tapping her fingertips together as her eyes darted from Freddy to Ana. “LET’S SING ANOTHER ONE.” 

“The fuck-k-k I will.” 

“Maybe later,” said Ana, still eyeing Freddy. “Let’s play a game first.”

“YAY!”

“THAT’S A GREAT IDEA!”

“N-N-No! S-St-Stop-p-p it! This isn’t-t-t fun-un-un—ALL RIGHT!”

“Trust me. Just trust me, okay? We’re going to play Simon Says,” said Ana. “Simon Says, look at me.”

All three animatronics clicked hard and faced her.

“THIS IS FUN!” chirped Chica, giving Freddy a sidelong glance.

Freddy shook his head, not disagreeing, but confused and wary.

“Simon Says, Bonnie, come here. No, all the way to me,” she said as he limped up to the edge of the stage. “If I can’t come up, you’ve got to come down. And you two, uh, Simon Says, Chica and Freddy, take two steps forward and bend over.”

They obeyed. It took Bonnie some time to get his bad leg down those three short stairs, which gave Ana plenty of time to position her tools and parts along the edge of the table in arm’s reach.

“Now sit down,” said Ana once he’d reached her.

“Y-YOU DIDN’T SAY SIMON SAYS,” Freddy warned.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Ana found a hairband in the bottom of her bag and tied her hair back in a messy half-braid, then turned around, “Bonnie, Simon Says—”

Bonnie was sitting on the edge of the stage. 

“—sit down,” she concluded slowly.

His ears twitched.

“Okay, you know what? Whatever. Simon Says, Chica, hold your arms out.” Ana caught Chica’s hand and adjusted it so the penlight she held was aimed into the cavity of Bonnie’s head. “Now don’t move.”

“YOU DIDN’T SAY—”

“Simon Says don’t move. Freddy, Simon Says hold your arms out,” she ordered, reaching for him.

“RULE NUMBER SIX,” he snapped, jerking back. “DON’T TOUCH FREDDY.”

“Fine, then Simon Says point the phone right here.”

“DON’T TOUCH-CH-CH ME,” he grumbled, bending back over and aiming the phone into Bonnie. 

“I thought hugs were always on the menu.”

“SO. IS. PIZZA. DO. YOU. SEE. ANY.”

“Wow. Someone had a big bowl of bitch-flakes this morning. I need more light,” she muttered, pushing Bonnie’s head back and trying to find some magical way to get both hands in him without throwing shadows over the places she needed to work. “Turn your eyes on, guys.”

“YOU DIDN’T SAY—”

“Simon Says! God damn, Freddy! Simon Says, can you just help me out without being as obnoxious as you possibly can about it?”

“You s-s-said the magic words,” Bonnie told her. “He h-h-has to p-pl-play the game.”

Freddy was scowling again. He waited for Ana to look up at him and then his eyes came on. The first few notes of the Toreador March sounded and his eyes flickered at first, but the music shut off and the light steadied. 

Ana started to reach up to adjust the angle of Freddy’s head, but thought better of it when his mouth opened. Instead, she took Bonnie’s head between her hands and tilted it, blowing on the cameras and poking at loose wires. “Eyes,” she muttered. “Where am I going to get eyes…? Where do you keep your spare parts, my man?”

“Th-There aren’t any up-p-p here,” Bonnie said just as Freddy said, “RULE NUMBER TEN, CUSTOMERS ARE NOT ALLOWED BACKSTAGE.”

“Oh ho, backstage, you say.” Ana took her phone from Freddy and shone its light over the wall at the rear of the stage. She could see the outline of a door, very well camouflaged; had not the years left a deposit of grime in every niche, it would have been invisible. However, she didn’t think Freddy was going to allow her anywhere near it, so she pointed instead. “Is there another door?”

All three animatronics clicked hard and said, in stuttering unison, “YES,” with Freddy adding, “ONLY BAND MEMBERS ARE ALLOWED ONSTAGE!” in case she’d forgotten in the last three minutes.

Ana thought about it and said, “How can I access the backstage area?”

Again, all three animatronics clicked, Bonnie once, Chica three times and Freddy for nearly half a minute, so that their answers staggered: “You c-c-can’t.” “ONLY EMPLOYEES ARE ALLOWED IN THE PARTS AND SERVICES ROOM.” “RULE NUMBER TEN, CUSTOMERS ARE NOT ALLOWED BACKSTAGE…STOP. ASKING.”

“Employees,” Ana mused, glomming onto Chica’s words as the most helpful. “Simon Says, nobody move. I’ll be right back.”

“Where-re-re are you going?” Bonnie asked, standing.

“Just going to clock in, my man. Simon Says, sit your purple butt down and don’t move.”

“Clock-k-k in?” Bonnie sat, looking up at Freddy, who shook his head, never taking his narrow eyes off Ana.

By the blue light of her cell phone, Ana made her way down the hall, past the pig, through the security office and into the break room. The poster of the Freddyland wannabes distracted her, but only for a few seconds. 

Lala Loppette. Seriously. Lala. 

Never mind. Past the poster and the dilapidated sofa where untold teens had spilled untold volumes of hormonal fluids into its sagging fibers stood a deep bank of lockers. All had been forced open over the years, but what she was looking for wasn’t worth stealing. All the same, she had to open a dozen or so lockers before she found one of the deep purple long-sleeved work shirts that comprised a security uniform here at Freddy Fazbear’s. There was even a hat, six-sided like a policeman’s hat, with a plastic brim and a shiny gold shield.

The shirt was big enough that she could put it on over her tee. As she did so, the stink of mildew engulfed her and it only grew stronger as the fabric warmed against her body. She caught sight of her reflection in the security office window as she buttoned the shirt up, trying to brace herself against the ghost of Aunt Easter, but it was her mother there instead. Her mother, playing dress-up in her twin sister’s work clothes, but too hard and unhappy to ever pass for pretty, laughing Marion Blaylock. Ana kept her eyes down after that until she was well out of the security room.

She could hear the animatronics talking clear from the hall, although it was not a routine she recognized, and in any case, they stopped when she walked into the room. It was Chica who broke out of the stare first, pointing one mostly intact finger at her and saying, “WOW, YOU’RE REALLY SMART.”

Freddy glared at her, then at Ana. “WHAT ARE YOU UP TO?” he asked in his friendliest voice with his scowlingest face.

“Don’t mind me.” Ana put one foot on the stage and eyed him cautiously. “Just heading backstage for some parts, as we employees of Fazbear’s Pizza are wont to do when we need a spare pair of eyes.”

Freddy clicked, twitching, as he watched her ease onstage. His glare did not subside, but he didn’t chime in with the rulebook.

“Awesome,” said Ana, once she was certain she was not about to be backhanded across the room. She walked over, giving Freddy a wide berth, and poked around until she found the sliding panel that opened on—an electronic lockpad. “Oh, what fresh slice of iced hellcake is this?” 

Bonnie snickered.

“You know the pass code?” she asked without much hope.

“Yeah, b-b-but—” Bonnie began. 

Freddy unfolded his arms and whapped him in the back of the head.

“But-t-t there’s no pow-ow-ower!” Bonnie finished, rubbing at a patch below one ear, nowhere near the point of impact. 

“DON’T FIGHT,” said Chica, tapping her wingtips together. “HERE AT FREDDY’S, WE HAVE A FEW RULES. NUMBER SEVEN. DON’T HIT.”

“DON’T. TELL. ME. THE. RULES,” Freddy shot back, looking annoyed.

“What’s the pass code?” asked Ana, feeling very patient.

“It—” began Bonnie.

Freddy hauled off and whapped him again, then pointed into his non-existent face and said, “DON’T. THAT’S AN ORDER.”

“D-D-Damn, Freddy! Would-d-d you j-j-just let-t-t me talk-k-k? I was j-j-just g-g— _GOING ON A BEAR HUNT!_ —going to say it-t-t won’t work-k-k without power!”

“Yeah, but I have a gas generator at home,” Ana inserted. “I could have it here in fifteen minutes and you could have new eyes in an hour if you tell me the code.”

Freddy thrust both arms at Ana in a broad, ‘See?!’ gesture.

“Oh,” said Bonnie.

Freddy gave him one more smack, to grow on, so to speak, and folded his arms again, glaring at Ana.

Ana waited, then said, “Bonnie?”

Bonnie ‘looked’ at her.

“Pass code?”

He looked at Freddy, looked at her. “I c-c-can’t.”

And Freddy grunted and glared at her.

“Dude, that’s where your eyes…” She stopped, then turned to address Freddy, the absurdity of having to argue with a toy bear putting laughter along the very real edge in her voice as she said, “That’s where his eyes are! You have got to let me in there!”

“NO, I DON’T.”

“What is your problem, Freddy, for real?”

“ONLY EMPLOYEES ARE ALLOWED IN THE PARTS AND SERVICES ROOM. HERE AT FREDDY’S, WE HAVE A FEW RULES. THE RULES ARE FOR YOUR SAFETY. RULE NUMBER TEN, CUSTOMERS ARE NOT ALLOWED BACKSTAGE.”

“I’m not a customer.”

That seemed to stump Freddy, but not for long. “YOU. DON’T. WORK. HERE.”

“I have the uniform.”

“YOU. DON’T. WORK. HERE.” His eyes, already narrow, managed to narrow a little more. “GOOD BOYS AND GIRLS DON’T TAKE THINGS THAT DON’T BELONG TO THEM.”

Ana rolled her eyes, then flung out her arms, saying, “I need a pair of damn eyes! That’s it! That’s all! I’m not going to…to loot the stupid parts room! Work with me here, damn it!”

“YOU. DON’T. WORK. HERE.”

“You are such a disappointment,” she told him.

He blinked and his glaring eyes opened up, as if he were hurt, but only for a second. Then they crashed down again and he said, “YOU! DON’T! WORK! HERE!” so loudly that his speakers spat out a squeal of feedback.

“That’s beside the point.” She pushed some buttons, then punched them, then stood and fumed. If there were hinges, she could pull the pins, but of course there weren’t. No hinges, no latch, nothing to interfere with the illusion that there was no door.

Fuck it.

“You know what?” she said. “There’s more than one way to defur a feline. If you won’t let me open the door, I’ll knock it down.”

“NO!” said all three animatronics together. Bonnie had stood up. Chica had flung her arms out in a wide-eyed ‘stop’ gesture. Even Freddy had straightened out his eyelids and looked alarmed.

“Relax, I’ll get you a new door. One without a lock.” Ana backed up for a running start, saying, “Be right back.”

Moving faster than she ever would have thought on first seeing him shamble down the hall, Freddy lunged across the stage and seized her. His arm hit like a brick to the stomach, knocking the wind out of her so that even if she had the instinct to yell, she couldn’t have. Her feet skidded out ahead of her, victims of her own aborted momentum, and she would have fallen if he hadn’t scooped her up as he did, holding her at eye level and looking as if he were resisting the urge to give her a good neck-snapping shake.

“Let go,” said Ana, more annoyed than alarmed (although she was alarmed, especially when he did not let go). “Unless you’ve got a specific rule against—”

“That’s a security d-d-door,” interrupted Bonnie. “Don’t-t-t do it! You’ll b-b-break your everything-ing! Just, like, all the b-b-bones!”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Every other piece of this building is held together with tinfoil and children’s tears. Why would they put a—what the hell?” she finished as she gave the door a kick to demonstrate its fragility. If she weren’t in her work boots, she might have broken a toe. “That’s a steel door!”

“The hell it-t-t is,” said Bonnie. “That’s f-f-four inches of solid t-t-tungsten carbide super-alloy. _I_ c-c-couldn’t b-br-break that door down.”

Ana gaped at him for a second or two, trying very hard not to believe it and ultimately failing. “Why the hell,” she sputtered, “is there a four-inch tungsten what-the-fuck-ever door on the backstage room at a pizza parlor? What have you _got_ back there? A pack of fucking dinosaurs?”

“It’s where—”

Freddy grunted.

Bonnie looked at him, then at Ana. “—we keep…stuff,” he said lamely. “Just, you know, valuable, uh, p-p-p—PART OF THIS NUTRITIOUS—parts and stuff.”

Chica slapped one hand over her face and gave him a thumbs-up with the other, shaking her head.

“More valuable than that door? Because I don’t know what…what tyrannosaurus carbonite is, but I’m pretty sure I could smelt it down and buy…I don’t know, the moon? Why would anyone need that kind of security? How the hell am I supposed to get back there?”

“YOU CAN’T,” said Freddy and set her down with a jarring thump. “ONLY EMPLOYEES ARE ALLOWED BACKSTAGE.”

“I heard you the first six thousand times. If I can’t go through the door,” she muttered, thinking aloud, “maybe I can go through the wall.” 

“NO. YOU CAN’T.”

“Excuse me if I don’t take your word for it.” Ana moved at once to the door, picking at the damp drywall surrounding the jamb and exposing more dull metal, not just as part of the frame, but beneath the wall itself. Apparently, they were storing the spare parts in a giant vault.

“RULE NUMBER TEN,” Freddy began, watching her through narrow eyes.

“Yeah, yeah.” Heaving a sigh of defeat, Ana dropped down from the stage, already stripping out of the scummy uniform shirt. 

“K-K-Keep going,” Bonnie prompted, earning himself another smack from the paw of the morals police.

Ana laughed, putting a little grind in it as she shucked out of the sleeves. Under Freddy’s disapproving glare, she bundled shirt and hat together, tossed them both onto the table next to her pack, and went back to Bonnie, just in case he’d decided to spontaneously grow new eyes. He hadn’t, so what did that leave? No eyes? Just…sockets? She looked at Swampy and specifically, at Swampy’s empty eye-sockets. She tried to imagine them with the pinpoint lights of the cameras deep inside and maybe a spider scuttling out. Fuck that noise.

As she thought it over, she found herself looking back over her shoulder in the direction of the foyer. The foyer…and that creepy banjo-plucking rooster. Brewster. 

Brewster still had his eyes.

“I know you’re supposed to have purple eyes,” she remarked. “But how would you feel about going green?”

“What d-d-do you mean?” asked Bonnie and Chica chirped, “HI, BREWSTER! WELCOME TO FREDDY’S!”

Bonnie looked at her (Chica spread her arms in the most obvious ‘Well, duh!’ gesture Ana had seen outside of grade school), then at Ana (she mimicked Chica, who twittered electronic laughter), then up at Freddy, who, for a change, did not seem to have a rule against dismembering fellow animatronics for their body parts. When Freddy shrugged and nodded, Bonnie looked at Ana again. “GO FOR IT.”

Ana headed for the lobby.

Brewster’s head did not lift off and the screws that held it on were rusted through and impossible to remove, giving Ana all the excuse she needed to go back for her hammer and bash his impostering little head in. A brief act of mutilation later, she was back with two eyes, two eyelids, and an assortment of important-looking wire frames, springs and fastenings. It made her a little nervous to see that although Brewster’s eyes appeared to be the same as the other animatronics had—flat doughnuts, fairly solid at the outer edge but rubbery and flexible toward the middle ring—his pupils were just some black plastic circles with a couple LED bulbs to the side, nothing at all like the complex setup in Bonnie’s head. Still, they were what she had, so if they didn’t fit, maybe she could just tweak the frames around them. Anything had to be better than what he had now, which was a crater with a couple cameras clamped to his metal skull. 

Returning to the stage to lay them out (all three animatronics turned their heads to look at them, then at her), Ana took Bonnie’s face and turned it the right way, eyeing it and the space it had to fill, then set it aside and took out her magnifying headlamp. She folded the lens down, switched on the light, adjusted its beam and picked up a can of air. “Look down,” she ordered, bending over.

“YOU DIDN’T SAY—” Freddy began, then sighed because Bonnie had already tipped his head forward. 

What a mess…

She studied it for a while, only picking out what was necessary to expose his endoskeleton and mostly just identifying the mechanisms that she’d somehow need to salvage in order to keep his eyes, muzzle and jaw functional. When she was familiar with what she had to work with—not confident, by any means, but familiar—she realized that Bonnie had been more or less forced to stare down the loose neck of her shirt all this time. And he hadn’t said a word.

“Enjoying the view?” she asked with a crooked smile.

“Uh…”

“It’s okay. I wore my best bra for you.”

“AWW, YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE!” A pause. “YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T HAVE.”

She remembered that line from one of the routines he shared with Chica. Something about her new turkey-peas-and-mashed-potatoes pizza recipe she’d cooked for him, but when she glanced up to see what Chica thought about this interpretation, Chica was looking off into the wall. Funny, how the slightest angle of her head, the minute lowering of her eyelids, and maybe just the uneven lighting could seem to change the nuances of her expression, making sunny, birdbrained Chica look…sad.

“You okay there, hotwings?” she asked.

Chica’s eyes rotated back to her. A second later, her head turned. She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“YOU ALL KNOW WHO THIS IS, DON’T YOU, KIDS?” asked Freddy with a scowl. “LET’S HEAR IT FOR CHICA THE CHICKEN!”

“IT’S OKAY, FREDDY,” said Chica as cheerfully as ever, although her plastic face never lost that sad-eyed appearance. “YOU CAN CALL ME ANYTHING, AS LONG AS YOU DON’T CALL ME LATE TO DINNER! LET’S EAT!”

“Well, you know what you always say, sister,” said Ana, pushing Bonnie’s head a little further into her cleavage as she bent over. “Gotta wash up first.” 

“BE SURE TO USE SOAP!”

“Alcohol wipes,” said Ana, holding one up. “Experience has taught me that, as with so many things in life, liquor is quicker. Okay, Bon, here we go. Eyes on me, right here.” She tapped her cleavage and kept her hand there until his cameras quit glancing aside at Freddy and Chica and focused on her boobs. “That’s it. Now don’t move. Think you can do that for me?”

“I’ll t-t-try.”

“HMPH,” said Chica, which might well have been the first time Ana heard anyone say that exactly as it was spelled. “JUST DO YOUR BEST.”

Grinning, Ana started cleaning, working her way from the bottom, where all the crud of however many years he’d been here had accumulated, to the top and back down again. Spritz and wipe, probe and scrape, spritz and wipe again. 

It was an awkward job, made worse by having to either hunker just a little or bend just a little, and it wasn’t long before her knees and back both protested. After the third time she had to stop just to stretch out the ache, she gave in. She put one hand on Bonnie’s shoulder and one knee on the stage, then swung her leg up and straddled him. 

His ears snapped straight up. “OH YEAH.”

Chica and Freddy looked at each other.

That’s better,” she muttered, wiggling herself comfortable. “You okay down there?”

“ONLY BAND MEMBERS—” Freddy began.

“I’m not on the stage,” said Ana, spreading her arms in a gesture of perfect compliance. “I’m on Bonnie, who is a band member. There anything in your completely irrelevant list of rules that says I can’t sit on Bonnie?”

“There b-b-b-better not-t-t be,” Bonnie remarked. He touched her braid. 

“RULE NUMBER ELEVEN,” said Chica, “PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW YOUR CHILDREN TO CLIMB OR PULL ON THE ANIMATRONICS.”

“I’m not a child. Anything else?”

Freddy and Chica looked at each other again.

“So lighten up, guys. Bonnie, hold onto me, would you? Just to—not the ass!” she laughed, slapping at his hands, which had clamped down on her back-end. 

His ears went straight up and he yanked his hands back like he’d put them on a hot stove. “S-S-Sorry, I c-c-can’t see where I’m p-p-putting-ing them.”

“It’s fine,” she assured him, catching his wrists and bringing them firmly back to her body under Freddy’s narrow stare. “Maybe later. But for right now, just grab my waist and hold me steady. Okay, now look down again. Uh, Simon Says…yeah, that’s it. Now hold still.”

Back to work she went to the world through the magnifying lens, lost to time. A minute or an hour later, and she had Bonnie’s insides cleaned up and ready for his eyes. Fortunately, with a little swearing and a lot of effort, the rooster’s peepers fit just fine over the exterior support structure of his cameras. Their lenses became the pupils of his eyes, dilating and contracting as she fussed with their alignment, although having his eyes float there in the dark space beneath his ears and above his lower jaw wasn’t much of an improvement overall.

“Better?” she asked, wiping his new eyes off with an alcohol swab. 

“THAT LOOKS GREAT!” said Bonnie.

Chica clicked, twitched, and said, “THANKS! IT’S MY LATEST RECIPE, GARLIC CHICKEN AND ARTICHOKE!”

“I’d eat that,” said Ana vaguely. “All right, Bon. This bit’s tricky. Tip your head back.” She kept her hand on him as a guide and he let her move him, his eyes shifting inside his head to watch her hand as she made a few of the more obvious connections from the computer-case-ish looking thing in the back of his head to his eyes and then to the wire frames that would ultimately work his eyelids, and there she was stuck. 

His eyes had to fit perfectly inside the sockets of his face. His face had to rest perfectly on a framework she hadn’t even reconstructed yet. That framework had to be anchored to Bonnie’s endoskeleton in such a manner that it did not even slightly touch his eyes, his jaw, his muzzle, or any other moving part. Although she could rebuild the frame itself, the pneumatic tubes and gears that made those moving parts move were not as replaceable, not to mention the risk of blinding him if she managed to break those cameras.

After spending several minutes of decreasing confidence trying to work it out for herself, Ana looked up at Freddy.

He looked back at her, his upper eyelids slanting downward as his lower ones came up in a way that might be called suspicion.

“Simon says, don’t move,” she told him.

That loud click happened again. He twitched at the waist and again at the neck, as if simultaneously suppressing both a backwards step and a shake of his head. He didn’t move.

Ana climbed down off Bonnie’s lap and up onto the stage.

“PLEASE KEEP AWAY FROM THE ANIMATRONICS!” Chica said, looking from Ana to Freddy and back in twitchy fits. “FOR YOUR SAFETY, KEEP CLEAR OF THE STAGE!”

“It’s fine,” Ana assured her. “I’m just going to take a quick peek and I’ll get right back down.”

“HERE AT FREDDY’S, WE HAVE A FEW RULES!” said Chica, louder, if that was possible. “RULE NUMBER SIX: DON’T TOUCH FREDDY! SAFETY FIRST!”

Freddy’s upper body jerked back, but his feet remained fixed in place. “THE RULES ARE FOR YOUR SAFETY!” he boomed at an ear-piercing volume. “DON’T TOUCH THE ANIMATRONICS! DON’T CLIMB ON THE STAGE! _DON’T TOUCH FREDDY!_ ”

“Simon Says, hush,” said Ana, reaching for his head. “Relax, I’m only going to—”

Freddy clicked three times, each one louder and somehow harder than the one before, and then suddenly, his arm swung. His open palm hit her chest and the next thing she knew, her back was hitting the stage wall. Her legs went out from under her; her butt hit the padded stage and rotten drywall rained over her head and shoulders.

Toreador March blaring, Freddy came for her, his heavy stride like a hammer on her ears. He bent, his lenses dilated as wide as they could go, turning his eyes to empty sockets lit by only a pinpoint of reflected light. His mouth dropped open, filling Ana’s entire line of sight with nothing but his metal teeth, and just in case she hadn’t gotten the point yet, his internal speakers let out a bone-humming snarl of wordless sound—not quite electronic feedback and not quite a human yell, but somewhere in between—over which a voice even bigger than his stage voice roared, “IF YOU DON’T FOLLOW THE RULES, YOU’RE GOING TO GET HURT.”

Ana didn’t move. 

Neither did Freddy.

The light, mechanical notes of the Toreador March plinked away at the silence, then sputtered, and finally stopped. 

“F-F-Freddy,” said Bonnie. “P-P-P-Please.”

“Please,” Ana repeated, just in case that was the magic word here. If she felt a little silly explaining herself to a giant toy, so be it, but when the toys came with teeth that big and that close, maybe a few explanations were in order. “I’m not going to hurt you and I don’t want to hurt him. I need to see how you are put together. That’s all. I’m not going to break anything. I just need to see.”

Freddy’s head tipped just a little, making his teeth catch the light in new and interesting ways. _I will bite,_ that black-socket stare said. _You can dress me up in a hat and make me sing on a stage, but I’m still a bear and I. Will. Bite._

“It has to be you,” Ana said. “I only get one shot at this. Just one. And I can do it, but I can only do this if I can see what it is I need to do. I can’t look this up on the internet or hire a repair-guy. It has to be you. Please.”

Freddy’s glare wavered as the lenses in his eyes contracted, giving him back his stare. His very, very angry stare. Then he closed his mouth, but he did not back up. He stayed right where he was, oppressively looming, as Ana gathered her legs under her and stood.

“I just need to see,” she said again.

He did not say yes or no or threaten to bite her hand off if she put it on him again. His speakers grumbled once and then he turned around. “GET. OFF. THE. STAGE.”

“Freddy,” she began. “Come on, guy, this is Bonnie we’re talking about.”

“I. SAID. GET. OFF.”

Sighing, Ana returned to her place next to Bonnie at the front of the stage. “Freddy—”

“SHUT. UP.”

That was so startling to hear, she actually did.

Freddy limped past Chica almost all the way to the other end of the stage, then turned and came back. He started to bend over only to straighten and limp away again, growling through his speakers.

“CAN. YOU. DO. THIS,” he said suddenly. He turned around, glaring at her, eyes lit, but the pupils so big, they barely glowed at all. “CAN. YOU. REALLY.”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “But I know I can’t do it blind and you are the only one who is put together like him.”

“YOU. JUST. WANT. TO. LOOK.”

“Right.”

“NOT. TOUCH.”

“Hands off,” she promised, holding them up.

Freddy looked at her, just looked at her, and at last, he reached up and gripped his muzzle, lifting the top part of his mouth up and away from his head. There were no connecting wires; the endoskeleton slipped out of the carapace as easily as a hand from a glove. Freddy limped over to her, still glaring and still growling, but bent close and brought up her cell phone, aiming its light at his own head. She could see plenty of wires and pistons and cables inside, and more importantly, she could see where and how these mechanisms were anchored to his endoskeleton. At once, that other-vision in her brain lit up, making mental adjustments between Freddy’s bear-head anatomy and Bonny’s bunny-head, and, just like a dark angel fluttered up and landed on her shoulder to whisper step-by-step instructions in her ear, she knew what to do.

Now to do it.

Ana bit open her bag of aluminum rods and shook a few out over the stage beside her. She clamped the first one to his endoskeleton’s upper jaw and began to build outward, using her own hand as a shaping block, glancing up at Freddy’s exposed muzzle-frame for guidance when it came to tricky things like springs and joints. 

At last, the final rod was clamped into place and Bonnie had a muzzle again. It still looked awful, jutting out of the cavity in his head, all teeth and tubes and machinery, but looks weren’t everything.

“Bite, Bonnie,” she ordered.

“YOU DIDN’T SAY SIMON SAYS,” said Chica after a moment, since Freddy was still giving her the silent treatment.

Bonnie snapped his metal jaws on the air. His teeth did not quite meet and the hinges on the left side of his lower jaw scraped on the frame. Sure, it worked, and given what she’d had to do to the spring on that side to get it in place, it was never going to be perfect, _but_ …

“Okay, I can do better than that,” Ana muttered, and crawled back onto his lap, pulling her toolbox closer. “Head back, Bonnie. Mouth open, wide as you can. Don’t move.”

Back to work she went, unhooking every spring on the left side of his face and adjusting the facial frame as much as possible by hand before bringing out her precision pliers, a sculpting pick and a soldering iron. “Now,” she said soothingly as she switched the lattermost on and that little plume of smoke went up. “This may look scary, but I know what I’m doing.”

“I t-t-trust you.”

“I. DON’T.”

“I’M HUNGRY!”

“IT’S OKAY,” said Bonnie, his eyes flicking first to Chica, then to Freddy. “I’M OKAY.”

“You’re okay,” she agreed. She reached into his mouth, coaxing his jaws open and fitting them back into place. She bit down on the pick for safe-keeping and went to work with the pliers and solder. “Just got to secure the contact points so you have a solid frame,” she said around the pick. “Find your happy place and relax.”

The smell of hot solder intensified, overcoming even the reek of mildew and rot permeating the air. Sparks spat from the tip of the iron, glowing gold behind Bonnie’s teeth. Foul smoke thickened.

“I hate t-t-to interrupt,” Bonnie said pleasantly. True to his word, he didn’t move at all when he spoke. His lower jaw remained immobile while his voice emanated from a speaker in his throat. “Should I b-b-be on fire?”

“Yeah, you’re fine.” But she switched off the iron long enough to wipe him down again, using dry swabs this time. “I went a little heavy on the alcohol, is all. It’s just burning off. Relax.”

“R-R-Relax, she says,” muttered Bonnie, his cameras whirring as he watched the smoke funnel up out of his head. “You want-t-t to tell me how I’m sup-p-posed to relax when you’re t-t-trying to turn me into a fire-b-b-breathing b-b-b—BEST BUDDY—bunny?”

“Just think of how great it’ll be to close your eyes again.”

“Oh. Wow, yeah.”

“Not to mention all the kissing you’ll get to do once I fix your mouth.” 

“K-K-Kissing. Right. Who th-the hell—HELLO THERE! WELCOME TO F-F-FRED—would ever w-w-want to kiss me?”

“I did.”

His eyes changed focus, their lights softening as the lenses widened. “You were sp-sp-special.”

Freddie glanced at Chica. Chica looked at the wall.

“Nothing special about me,” Ana said distractedly, laying more solder, all her attention fixed on the tip of the iron. “You’re a sexy beast, that’s all. No woman could resist your charms.”

“You are s-s-seriously overestimating the s-s-sex appeal of a seven— _FOOT IN, YOU TAKE YOUR LEFT FOOT_ —tall, talking-ing-ing purple bunny.”

“The internet has made things weird, my man.” She took the pick out of her mouth and bit down on the handle of the soldering iron instead, holding it between her teeth like a blunt. “You watch. As soon as I get your handsome face back on, you’ll be off like a shot, playing a different city every night on your world tour and amassing a mountain of MILF panties you could ski down.”

Freddy grunted disapprovingly.

“N-N-Not a lot of F-Fazbear groupies these d-days.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” 

“Not for me.” But in spite of his self-deprecating cheer, his words ended on a slight lift, almost as if it were a question.

“You better believe it, Bon.” She took the iron back out of her mouth, unthinkingly tapping at it with her pinkie like it had ash she needed to knock off, and stuck it back between her teeth. “You know, I had your poster when I was a kid? Not the whole band, either. Just you.”

His ears came up. He made a huffing sound, not quite a laugh, but almost one, wanting to be one. “They n-n-never sold posters of just-t-t me.”

“Well, I had one.”

“You sure it-t-t wasn’t F-Foxy?”

“Pfft. Foxy wishes he were that cool. It was just you, standing in the spotlight, going full Jimmy Page on that guitar. And you were wearing a little red bow tie. So, like, half Jimmy Page, half Buddy Holly. And half Easter Bunny, I guess.”

“Th-Three halves?”

“It’d take three halves to hold all your raw sexual charisma. Tip your head back. Little more. Hang on. My knees are killing me.” Ana shifted around, unfolding her legs with a grimace, then wrapping them more comfortably around him. She scooted forward until her hips bumped right against his. “That’s better.”

“Hell y-y-yeah, it is,” he said, sounding startled. 

“Hold on to me. Tighter. Don’t look at them, look at me. Hold me like you mean it, my man. There you go. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the poster. You know, no offense, but I’m glad you lost that bowtie. It was a little too adorkable for my taste.”

“Yeah, I was never that fond-d-d of it either, but it c-c-could have been worse. There were sup-po-posed to be some B-Buddy Holly g-g-glasses to go with it, but he c-c-couldn’t find ones he really-ly-ly liked.” His cameras whirred as they changed focus, watching her solder the eye-frames to his endoskeleton before focusing back on her face. “I just…I don’t remember anything-ing like that-t-t.”

“Well, yeah, but you wouldn’t, would you? It was the other B—uh,” she said, catching herself before she could say his name. “The other place, I mean.”

“Yeah, but…Wait, what-t-t other place?”

Wincing, Ana admitted, “There was another pizza place before this one, my man.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said with a touch of impatience. “What c-c-color was I?”

“Huh?”

“In the poster. What c-c-c-c—CALVARIAC ENDOCAVITY— _color!_ ” he spat at the end of that, ears slapping flat.

“I said, don’t move! Seriously, I am one hard twitch from soldering you a permanent case of lockjaw!” 

“Sorry, but god-fucking-damn! Enough with th-the junior med-d-dical jumble!” He took a moment to cool his rapidly-spinning gears, then said, “What color w-w-was I in the poster?”

“What kind of question is that? Purple, of course. It was you, just from the Freddy’s on Circle Drive.”

“Yeah, b-b-but, see, that’s impossible. They n-n-never made a poster of just me there. It was always-ays me and the b-b-band or all of us, or j-j-just Freddy or just-t-t Foxy. You sure I w-w-wasn’t blue?”

“How would you know what was on the posters at…wait a minute.” Ana paused and drew back, switching off her iron to peer at him. “When the hell were you ever blue?”

Freddy grunted.

Bonnie looked up at him, then at Ana. 

“I could take you into the foyer,” she told him, thumbing back at it with her soldering iron. “And I defy you to show me one picture of a blue you, going back fifty frigging years. You were never blue. You’ve always been purple.”

Bonnie looked at Freddy again.

“Have you?” she asked, beginning to be alarmed. “Don’t mess with me on this, Bon. I may forget things, but I don’t make shit up. I don’t think I do…and if I am, I want to know it! When were you blue?”

“I, uh…” Bonnie twitched one shoulder. “Cr-Cr-Crossed wires. Uh…t-t-tell me about th-th-this poster. What-t-t else was in it?”

“Nothing. Just you.”

“But F-F-Freddy and Chica weren’t there? It did-d-dn’t say The Faz—FAZBEAR PIZZA—no! Fazb-b-bear Band!”

“Relax, my man. I hear you. Chill. And no. It had your name in the background, like it was neon lights, bright purple,” she recalled, resting her elbows on his shoulders for stability and getting back to work with the soldering iron. “And it said ‘Let’s Rock’ in shiny gold letters across the whole bottom.”

“Oh J-J-Jeez, that’s not a p-p-poster, that’s the promo art for the al-l-lbum!” 

“I didn’t know you made an album.”

“I d-d-didn’t. The s-s-studio guys thought-t-t it was t-t-too gimmicky, said-d-d no one was going to p-p-pay money for the _idea_ that an an-an-an—ANIMALS CAN YOU NAME, SWAMPY?—animatronic b-b-bunny was singing-ing-ing.” Bonnie’s right ear twitched and his voice dropped to a sullen mutter. “Meanwhile, the f-f-f—FUNCTIONAL RAPHE NUCLEI—stupid Chipmunks had made, like, t-t-twenty albums.” 

“And the Muppets are still making them.”

“No shit, right?” His head cocked. “How did you get-t-t it? I thought-t-t-t he only made one.”

“My aunt gave it to me. She used to work here. Well, not _here_ , but—Hold still,” she muttered, tipping his head back to anchor the founding bar of what would soon be his facial framework to the existing piece on the broken side of his head. “Anyway, she gave it to me and I loved that thing to death. When I saw your name on it in those big loopy letters, I honest to God thought you’d signed it. It was the only autograph I owned. Thought I owned. I did chores all summer to buy it a frame with my own money.”

He laughed again, that same breathy disbelieving sound, but his endoskeleton never twitched. “You f-framed-d-d it?”

“It hung on the wall until I was ten.” Using her hand as a shaping block, she bent the foundation bar into a gentle curve, clipped the end, slipped it under the other side of his head, and soldered it to the framework there. She trimmed it again, filed both ends smooth, gave the solder a spritz with the air can to stabilize it, and ran a critical eye over the result. Looked good. She went to work building the foundation bar outward, forming a stable anchor not only for Bonnie’s face, but for the muzzle, which she reminded herself would have to be able to move. “Under, you know, a picture of a unicorn or some girly garbage, I don’t remember. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. When I left, it was the only thing I took with me.”

“Really?”

“Well, that and some clothes. Hold still now. Still like a statue,” she warned, moving across the joints of the metal dowels, the pliers and iron exchanging places every few seconds, making adjustments that were only a fraction of a millimeter in places. Piece by piece, his framework began to take shape, growing outward and filling in. “You were the only thing I took that mattered. I kept you hidden under my mattress. In fact, you could say I slept with you every night. I literally wore you to pieces, my man. Wore you _out._ ” 

“Th-That would be hot, if you w-w-weren’t ten.”

“I think I was fifteen when the poster finally shredded beyond all redemption. Fifteen is hot, right?”

“I d-d-don’t think I should-d-d answer that.”

“Relax, Bon. We’re all alone. And besides—” She waggled her eyebrows without looking up from her work. “—I’m all grown up now, aren’t I?”

“I’ll say,” he agreed gravely, ignoring Freddy’s censorious grunt. 

“Well, when we’re done here, let’s us two grown-ups take a little walk and see if there’s any other stiff joints I can give you a hand with.”

“I know you d-d-don’t mean that-t-t.”

“Don’t be so sure. Hell, you wouldn’t be my first boyfriend with batteries.”

He blatted laughter through his speaker, then said, “I appreciate-ate the senti-t-t-timent, but let me remind-d-d you, there’s a serious design flaw b-b-below the beltline, b-baby girl.”

“Just going to have to color outside the lines, that’s all. Besides, you’re a musician, aren’t you? If all else fails, you can practice your fingering.” As Bonnie laughed and Freddy scowled, Ana straightened up and came at least partway back into the real world. Picking up his muzzle, she fit it over the rods jutting out through the hole below his facial framework and said, “Let’s see how you’re lining up. Simon Says, bite for me, Bon.”

He did, cautiously at first, then with greater confidence. His lower jaw met his muzzle perfectly.

“Now laugh,” she ordered, holding one hand up to mime a muzzle in front of her own face even as she squinted past it to try and see the rotator arm that worked the moving part of his mouth. “The big laugh, you know the one.”

He did not hyuck-hyuck for her, but he did move his muzzle up and down. 

“Plenty of clearance,” Ana muttered, running a finger between the framework and the edge of his muzzle and eyeing the thickness of his face where it waited on the table. “Looks level. How’s it feel on your end?”

“Not g-g-getting-ing any friction errors, if that’s what-t-t you mean.”

“Okay.” Ana slid the muzzle off and got back inside, making minute adjustments and giving every joint a good spray of WD-40. This time, when she put his muzzle back on, she gave it an extra shove and a testing smack to see if she could knock anything loose. “Looks solid to me. Bite.”

He worked his jaws, lower and upper both.

“I think we did it,” she said, pulling his muzzle off again and setting it aside. “Let’s just get you cleaned out.”

Bonnie handed her the air can.

She took it and had actually given him two or three cleansing squirts before it occurred to her how weird it was that he’d given her exactly the right thing she’d needed. Too late, she recoiled, looking at it and at him. 

He cocked his head, the lenses of his eyes humming as they focused on her face. “What?”

What, indeed? He’d seen her using the can, of course. He’d seen her using swabs and lens wipes too, but the can was still a good guess. He’d probably had as good a chance of handing her any of the tools he’d seen her use tonight. If he’d handed her a screwdriver, she’d have just laughed it off like the random object it was; this was no different. 

“Nothing,” she said, leaning into him once more. “Just…kicking up some dust here. Thought I was going to sneeze, like, _directly_ into your head, but I’m good.”

He believed her or at least, he didn’t question her, but Freddy’s grunt held more than a hint of suspicion.

“Great,” said Ana, climbing off him. “I need to work on his eyelids now,” she told Freddy. “So I need to take your head off and see how they work. Is that okay?”

Between one blink and the next, his eyes became black sockets. “NO.”

“Freddy, I need to see—”

He backed up, his shoulders hunched and lower jaw open to show her his teeth. “DON’T TOUCH FREDDY,” he warned heartily, glaring. “DON’T T-T-T-TOUCH. ME. DON’T. TOUCH-CH-CH ME. D-D-D-DON’T—” His head snapped back, lower jaw and upper muzzle glitching in different directions, and coming together again with the snap of a, well, a bear-trap, mere inches from her outstretched hand.

Long years of never flinching kept Ana still until her head could convince the rest of her she was in no danger. “I know you’re not going to hurt me,” she told him.

“NO. YOU. DON’T,” he growled through his teeth.

“Yeah, I do,” she said. “You’re Freddy Fazbear. You’re the leader, right?”

He blinked and the black in his eyes irised a little smaller, showing some of the whites and a thin ring of blue. He blinked again and his pupils shrank to their normal size, giving him real eyes again. He made a sound, something between a grunt and a growl. Slowly, Freddy closed his mouth and straightened up. 

“A leader has to make sacrifices for his friends,” said Ana. “This is a sacrifice. It’s going to be painful. I understand that. I respect it. But I can’t do this without your help. Please help. Okay?”

Freddy glared at her one long minute, maybe more, then looked at Bonnie.

Bonnie said nothing, just looked back up at him.

With another of those grunting growls, Freddy reached up and took his hat off. It appeared to be fixed to his head with a simple patch of velcro, but the fabric the velcro was attached to tore a bit before it came free. He turned the hat over in his hand, running his thumb over the patch as if he could push it back into place, then lowered himself to one knee and held the hat out to Ana.

He didn’t let go right away when she took it. “YOU’LL. JUST. LOOK,” he said. That strange, clipped way he had of talking made it difficult to know whether it were a question, a statement, or a warning. “YOU. WON’T. TOUCH.”

“I won’t do anything without your permission,” she promised.

He released his hold on the hat. She made a point of setting it with exaggerated care on the table, well back from her tools and other parts, where it could not be bumped or knocked onto the floor. When she turned back, he growled again and stiffly bent his neck, pointing at the base of one ear. “YOU. HAVE. TO. DO. THIS,” he said, static scratching under every word. “I. CAN’T. FEEL.”

“You okay?” she asked, not moving.

His eyes shifted, the lenses wide and black and lightless. “DO. I. LOOK. OKAY.”

“No.” She hesitated, thinking of the last night she’d been here, bad dreams and Freddy dragging her out from under the table to hold her when neither one of them wanted to be touched. “But you’re safe.”

Something in his plastic expression changed. When she reached for him, he didn’t growl again. The flocking was thickest on the top of his head, but old and brittle, leaving a grimy texture under her palm, through which she could feel the dull buzz of machinery like a hive of angry wasps. But he didn’t move as she felt around the bottom of his left ear. She found a small button and pressed it, sliding the round, fuzzy carapace off the metal frame now jutting through the groove in the top of his head, then did the same for his right ear. She put them together inside his muzzle and put all three on the table beside his hat.

“Simon says relax,” she told him, feeling under the edges of his head-piece until she found the catch. “Simon says trust me. Simon says I’m not going to hurt you.”

“DON’T.” He clicked a few times, grumbling to himself, then said, “PAT. ON. EYES. ME.”

“FREDDY, ARE YOU OKAY?” asked Chica. “RULE NUMBER SIX. DON’T TOUCH FREDDY. BE CAREFUL NOT TO BREAK THE RULES, KIDS. THE RULES ARE FOR YOUR SAFETY. FREDDY, DO YOU NEED HELP? I LIKE TO HELP MY FRIENDS. I CAN HELP.” 

Freddy held up one hand, never taking his eyes off Ana’s. She could feel the humming of machinery inside him, vibrating harder as gears spun faster, but he did not move as she lifted his head up and off. 

At once, several confusing points resolved themselves. “Well, shit, there’s half the trouble right there,” muttered Ana, leaning down to unhook the blue wires she had wasted a good fifteen minutes trying to attach to Bonnie’s eyelid mechanism. “These go to your eyebrows. Which I did not find in the lunchbox, so…I guess those are gone. So, what? The red wire goes…there…and the black ones…go to the back of your second mouth…so what works your eyelids? Please, God, don’t let it be those little tubey things that resemble the world’s smallest pneumatic pumps.” With a sigh, Ana looked up at Freddy, looking down at her. “Blink,” she said. “Simon says, blink, Freddy.”

He blinked.

“This is why I don’t go to church, God.”

“ARE YOU OKAY?” Chica asked.

“YES,” said the mass of wires and metal framework in Freddy’s voice. He laughed his Freddy-laugh and said, “BONNIE NEEDS OUR HELP, KIDS.”

Ana put his head down and squatted next to Bonnie, using a pick and a precision screwdriver to ease the delicate wire frame for his blinking mechanism into the hard plastic curve of his eyelids. It didn’t want to go and the plastic was old and brittle. She didn’t draw another breath until it snapped down into place. With tweezers, she picked up one of the world’s smallest pneumatic pumps and had another look inside Freddy’s head.

He blinked, slowly.

She went to work. It took a lot of time and a lot of blinking, but when she was done, the pumps were in and all the right wires were in all the right places. Now for the real test. She picked up his face and eased it over the facial framework she’d made, aligning its sockets over his eyes and pressing down hard. “Blink,” she told him.

He blinked. His eyelids scraped the inside of his face. The one on the left snapped its spring immediately and went all wonky.

“Fuck me sideways,” Ana said disgustedly. “Okay, okay. I got this. No problem. Sit tight. And you.” Setting Bonnie’s face aside, Ana picked up Freddy’s head and stood up to put it back on. She fastened it down, reattached his muzzle and his ears, and made sure his hat was on straight. “Thank you,” she told him.

“Th-th-thanks,” added Bonnie.

“THANK YOU, FREDDY!” said Chica, not to be left out.

Freddy did not reply. His eyes were still slanted down, not happy.

Ana climbed down off the stage and back onto Bonnie’s lap. “Hold me steady. Tighter. Okay, Simon Says, look left—your other left, genius. Oh shit, I mean my left. Look right. Sorry. Okay, now hold still.”

First, the fixing of the spring and the eyelid. Then, the fiddly adjustments to his facial framework, widening the sockets and pushing out the brows. Another fitting, with more blinking, this time smooth and trouble-free.

Now there was nothing left but the reattachment. 

“You still trust me?” she asked, pushing the unused rods away and bringing the rest of her hardware closer.

“Yeah,” said Bonnie.

“I need to take your whole head off. Is that okay?”

“D-D-Do what you got-t-t to do, baby g-g-girl.”

She gave Freddy a ‘see how hard that was?’ glance as she took off Bonnie’s ears, but didn’t rub it in any worse than that. Lifting Bonnie’s head away, she got up from his lap and sat beside him on the stage, pinning his head upside down between her thighs to free her hands.

“Light,” she said, blasting the exposed framework all the way around with the compressed air. 

Chica and Freddy both bent over and aimed their separate lights into the hollow head. Positioning Bonnie’s face over its frame, Ana took the first mooring plate and anchored it on both sides of the break. She put the second mooring plate on the opposite side of his head and anchored that, too, then moved her hand from the center of his face to the sockets of his eyes, keeping the face from creeping out of alignment as she worked her way around. 

It was not a perfect fit, but she’d known it wouldn’t be. Where possible, she filled gaps in with more polymer paste, quick-drying it with compressed air and filing it down smooth so the patches weren’t as noticeable and muttering to herself now and then because it looked like homemade shit. She was not a fabricator.

When she was done, she put the whole head aside and crawled back on Bonnie’s lap—he put his hands on her hips to steady her without being told this time—and went over every inch of his endoskeleton with wipes, swabs and WD-40, making minor repairs to loose joints and clogged gears as she discovered them.

He watched her, the metal rods of his naked ears twitching and the bulging globes of his glowing eyes humming as they kept her in focus. At last, he said, “I’m not-t-t freaking-ing you out, am I?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, all her attention on his second set of jaws as she reattached his silicone mouth.

“The way I look-k-k.”

She blinked at him, then leaned back and looked at him.

He looked back at her, the round metal casing that presumably housed his CPU dully reflecting the light from Chica’s eyes—all eyes and teeth and wire and metal bones.

“What’s wrong with the way you look?” she asked.

Chica and Freddy exchanged another glance.

“Light,” said Ana, bending over his mouth again.

Bonnie’s hands crept up a little and closed in. Not holding her steady. Just holding her.

She smiled, stuck her precision pick between her teeth, and kept working.

At last, she was done. Picking up Bonnie’s head, she fit it over his endoskeleton and felt out the brackets that secured it. She put on his muzzle and clamped it down, screwed on his ears and straightened them out. She ran her fingers over the worst of the cracks in his face, beginning and ending up at the top, where there was still a hole an inch wide and as long as her hand, but there was nothing she could do about that. 

“You’re going to have a scar,” she told him, tapping at it with a scowl. “But that’s okay. You know what a scar is, right?”

Bonnie’s ears twitched up. “No. W-What?”

“Nothing but the line that’s left over when something tried to break you—” She rubbed out a smudge of grease on his cracked face and smiled. “—and couldn’t. Besides, chicks dig scars. Don’t you?” she asked, looking up at Chica.

Chica leaned over and touched Bonnie’s cheek with the very tips of her fingers. “HI, BONNIE! IT SURE IS GREAT TO SEE YOU.”

He reached up and touched his fingers to his mouth, bottom jaw first…and then the top. He felt at his nose, squeezing it once like honking a horn, except the hackysack ball made no noise. He blinked, touched his eyelids, then felt at his cheeks, rubbing back and forth from the restored part of his face to the old, undamaged part and apparently not finding what to Ana’s eye was an obvious seam. “Are we d-d-d—DESCENDING RETICULAR FORMATION. Damn it.”

“Done,” she said for him. “Yup. Simon says, game’s over. Good job, guys. The first animatronic face reattachment and eye transplant in Mammon was a resounding success. And holy shit, it’s after midnight.” Ana took her phone and penlight back from Freddy and Chica (the light had dimmed and the phone’s battery icon was on its last bar) and turned them off, then climbed off Bonnie’s lap. Her back and shoulders made audible pops when she stretched and she had a wicked headache from looking too long through the magnifying headlamp. She took that off, rubbing away its phantom pinch and yawning as the last few hours crashed into her all at once. 

Bonnie got up as soon as she stepped away and limped off without another word, heading for the hall at the back of the room. When he reached the boy’s bathroom, he pushed the door open and disappeared inside, still feeling at his face. 

“Bye,” said Ana wryly, watching him go. “I gotta go, too, in case you care. No, no! Really can’t stay, but thanks for asking.”

“COME BACK SOON!” Chica chirped.

Freddy didn’t say goodbye this time. He just looked at her.

Ana gave him a crooked smile as she packed up her tools. “You ever gonna forgive me for taking your head off, big bear?”

His eyes slanted down at hard angles at once. “HI,” he said in his booming, hearty hey-kids voice. “I’M FREDDY FAZBEAR!”

“Sorry.” She brought his microphone out from her pack and held it out to him. “You ever going to forgive me, _Freddy?_ ” 

He held that strange, plastic stare a moment more, and then, slowly, his eyelids evened out and raised. The servos inside him hummed and paused, hummed and paused. “YES,” he said, oddly subdued even at this room-filling volume. “I. FORGIVE. YOU.”

“So we’re friends now?”

“DON’T. PRESS. YOUR. LUCK.” He took his microphone and said, “IT’S SAD TO SEE YOU GO.”

She huffed out half a laugh and raised the lantern, scanning the room to see if she’d missed any tools or left any junk. “It’s kind of sad to be here at all, to be honest, but yeah, it’s sad to go, too.”

“IT’S SAD TO SEE YOU GO,” he said again. His speakers buzzed as he skipped the song-part of the closing-time routine and picked up again at: “IT’S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE.” 

He stuck out his hand.

Amused, Ana shifted her lantern to her other hand and shook with him. She could feel the hard edges of his metal joints through the old, torn padding of his fingers and her heart broke a little. She looked around—the falling tiles, the cracked walls, the rotting party hats strewn over the grimy tables—and felt ridiculous. What was the point of patching Bonnie up just to go on living in this?

She looked at the floors and thought about what she’d need to scrape those tiles up…mortar was rotted out to pudding in places, she could do it with a shovel…what was the rough area of this place, anyway? Couldn’t be less than six thousand square feet just in this room and she’d need something better than this cheap synthetic crap to replace it with. Something high traffic, high traction, low maintenance, easy clean, not to mention something that could take the weight of the animatronics…and none of that mattered, because it was the walls that were going to be the issue here. Those would all have to come down and God knew what condition the frame would be in…but, no, the real issue was the roof, she thought, tipping her head back to study the creeping mold stains and bubbling. Before she did anything at all, she had to fix that roof, and like the walls and the floor, it would all have to go. One hundred percent. That was fifty thousand square feet, easy, all the flashing, new gutters…

What was she doing? She didn’t have the time or the money to fix up her actual house, much less Freddy’s!

He was still holding her hand, watching her while she stared at the ceiling tiles. Pulling her hand out of his grip pulled away some of the loose padding that poked through the holes in his fingers. She brushed it off on her thighs, thinking there was nothing she could do here, absolutely nothing. The building was abandoned and ought to be condemned. The animatronics were broken. Even if she could patch up their outer skins, and she couldn’t, she could only keep them running for so long before they broke down for good. She never should have come here, never should have erased her stupid fantasies of this place and replaced them with the decaying truth, but she had and now she needed to leave and try to remember this place as best she could because that roof was coming down someday very fucking soon and when it did, it would bury Freddy and the Fazbear Band and that was all she wrote.

“I’m sorry,” said Ana, searching Freddy’s eyes. “I know you don’t deserve this, but I’ve got shit of my own I need to deal with right now.”

“IT’S OKAY,” he said.

“No, it’s not. It’s not okay. I know that, but I can’t save you. I couldn’t even save me.” 

“SAFETY FIRST!” chirped Chica from across the room.

Freddy glanced back at her, then looked at Ana again. “THE RESTAURANT IS CLOSED,” he told her. “IT’S TIME TO GO HOME.”

Yes, it was. Long past time, some might say. Still, Ana hesitated, waiting for something more…she didn’t know what. If he’d opened his arms, she might have hugged him. He didn’t, so Ana shouldered her pack again, picked up her toolbox and squeezed out through the West Hall door. 

It must have been a cloudy night. Ana’s lantern was the only illumination in the hall and it did little to push the darkness back outside of her own small circle of light. She walked, keeping her eyes fixed on the yellowish glints reflected off Tux where he guarded the side door. Not until she reached him did she remember the door was chained again and she’d come in through the gift shop. And once she did realize it, she did not turn around. 

It was late. She didn’t need to stop. There was nothing she needed to say, nothing she needed to prove.

Ana put her toolbox down, but kept her day pack and her lantern, and headed for Pirate Cove.

The auditorium was empty. The curtain was still. She could see nothing, hear nothing. It stank.

“Foxy?”

She meant to call out, the way Freddy used to have to do. Come on, kids, say it with me! Fooooooxy! Instead, her voice bubbled out, not much louder than a whisper. She sounded, to her own amused senses, like a child. The child she’d been, maybe, just ten years old. The child who had never set but one foot in a Freddy’s. Just the one foot, just the one time, and she’d never so much as laid eyes on Captain Fox.

He wasn’t here. He had to be here. He wasn’t supposed to be able to leave Pirate Cove, David had said, and he would know.

“Captain?” she called, somewhat louder this time, but only somewhat. She stood there for a while, holding the lantern high overhead and peering into the black beyond it, listening to the weirdly muffled silence. 

What was she waiting for?

She turned and just as she was taking her first steps away, she heard the creak of hinges and the slam of a door, followed by a salty bellow: “WHO DARES CROSS SWORDS WITH OLD FOXY? I’LL KEELHAUL THE LOT OF YE! SHOW YERSELF!”

She looked back. 

A few seconds later, the heavy curtains surrounding the stage rustled and the mismatched light of Foxy’s eyes glowed out as he raised his eyepatch. “WHO GOES THERE? WHO DARES—G-G-GATHER ‘ROUND, SWABBIES, AND WE’LL—K-K-K-KEELHAUL THE LOT OF YE!”

“It’s me,” she said, coming all the way into the room and bringing the lantern down under her chin. She could barely see at all with its light right there by her eyes, but hopefully, he could see her. “It’s just me.”

Foxy’s head cocked. “I know yer v-v-voice,” he said, not in his auditorium-filling stage voice, but one that was less salty, more gruff. His own. When Ana lowered her lantern, his eyepatch came down, giving him a grim expression that said bloody work was afoot before he ever said a word. “YE MADE A MISTAKE COMING HERE THE FIRST TIME,” he said, drawing his cutlass. “AND I MADE A MISTAKE LETTING YE LIVE. NOW HERE WE ARE AGAIN AND ONE OF US JUST MADE THE LAST MISTAKE HE’LL EVER MAKE.” 

She recognized the quote. “That’s from the Wreck of the Pride,” she said. “When you and Captain Blackmane had your epic showdown on Skull Island. That was David’s favorite. We must have played it out a hundred times.” She looked away, remembering days down at the quarry, the clash of toy swords and their own shrill voices raised in bloodthirsty challenge. “He always got to be you.”

His head tipped back and his ears came forward. He raised his eyepatch, as if to get a better look at her, then snapped it down again and came another step out, letting the curtain drop behind him. “IF YE’VE COME FOR A FIGHT, OLD CAPTAIN FOX WILL OBLIGE YE. I’LL SPLIT YE LIGHTS TO LIVER AND SEND YER BONES TO DAVY JONES!”

“I don’t want a fight. I don’t want anything. I came to…” The absurdity of what she was doing tried to assert itself, but it couldn’t hold her any tighter than David held her now. David, who would have loved this place. David, who had always loved Captain Fox. And so had she. “I came to apologize.”

His eyes narrowed and opened back up again. He did not respond, which was not surprising. The animatronics apologized to each other all the time as part of their routine, teaching little kids a grown-up’s version of manners and morals, but Foxy was a pirate and his routines had a whole lot less to do with the please-and-thank-you set. 

“I’m sorry I said the things I said to you,” Ana went on, knowing it was pointless, but determined to put all the ghosts to rest anyway. “It wasn’t your fault. I was…tired. It was my first night back home, my first time here…and I wasn’t ready. I thought I was past all that, but it all came back and I just…wanted to blame someone. You have no idea what it’s like. He’s dead and there’s nothing to bury. He’s gone…and there’s no one to blame.”

He waited, his ears rotating now and then, as though he could hear all the things she wasn’t saying.

“Anyway, I’m sorry,” she said. “The one true thing I said that night was that he loved you. You were his hero. You were mine.”

He snorted through his speakers.

“Yeah, I know. Funny way of showing it, huh? But it’s true.” She walked along the bannister; Foxy walked along the edge of the stage, matching her step for step and keeping his cutlass pointed at her. “When I was a kid, you were Captain Fox, scourge of the seas. Blackmane, pirate hunters, monsters, mutineers…you faced and fought them all. There was none of that sharing and caring bullshit with you. You didn’t tell us to brush our teeth, you told us dragons were real and they could hurt you, that they don’t go away on their own and they are so much bigger and stronger than you are, and then you told us they could still be defeated…with one hand.”

Foxy glanced at his hook and looked at her again. 

“You made me think I could be a pirate, too. I can’t believe how stupid I was. I really thought the whole world was just the way you said it was. I used to sit in that fucking closet and be a thousand miles away, sailing on the open sea. I was going to be a pirate and kill dragons. I was going to dig up treasure and wear big feathery hats and drink rum all day and all my scars would turn into fucking great stories I could tell to wide-eyed little kids who’d want to grow up and be just like me. You were my hero,” she said again, her eyes moving over him, taking in damage that was too great, too encompassing to count. “Look at you. Look what they’ve done to you.”

His chin came up and his arms went out very slightly, as if putting the sorry state of his body on display and daring her to say anything about it.

“And you’re still standing,” she said. “After all this time, even here…you’re still Captain Fox.”

He said nothing.

“This is what I turned into,” said Ana, forcing a smile as she looked down at herself. “No ship, no dragons, no treasure. I don’t even like rum. All I got is the scars…and I never talk about them.”

Foxy lowered his sword a hair, then raised it again, not quite as high, and finally dropped it all the way. A moment later, he sheathed it. “Get-t-t out.” 

She blinked. “What?” 

“I s-s-said, get on with-th ye. Out. Show’s over-r-r—OVERBOARD—in the Cove. Rest-t-taurant’s closed.” He turned around, reaching to hook the curtain and return to his ship. “Just g-g-get out now and don’t let anyone see-e-e ye.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever. I have been rousted by a fox,” she announced to the world at large, smiling to prove she was not annoyed. She kind of was. “That’s a brand new high-water mark on the low points of my life. I’m going to buy a diary just to write that one down. And for your information, Captain, they already saw me.”

He stopped, ears snapping up, then turned around. “Eh? Who did?” 

“All of them.”

“Ye mean Bonnie.”

“I mean Freddy and Chica and Bonnie. That’s what ‘all of them’ means. Well,” she amended, thinking now of Brewster and the other new faces of Freddy’s, “all the real ones. Anyway, you don’t have to throw me out. I’m going. I only stopped in to see you before I left.”

He raised his eyepatch again, studying her with his head cocked and ears forward. “Freddy knows yer here?”

“Yeah, sure. Why?”

“And he l-l-let ye go?”

Ana paused and looked back at him, raising her lantern higher. “As opposed to what?”

His eyes moved back and forth as though reading from a list of potential answers only he could see, before he said, “C-C-Come down here to me. I w-w-want a look at ye.”

“I can’t. Restaurant’s closed, remember? I have to go.”

“We-e-e—WE’LL OPEN A BOTTLE O’ RUM AND TELL EACH OTHER TALES O’ THE SEA! Or talk,” he snarled at the end of that, smacking the back of his hook against his throat. “We c-c-could just talk.”

“It’s late,” she said, heading into the corridor. Her lantern somehow managed to catch the gaping grins of all those kids painted on the warring murals and turn them into screaming faces. “Time and tide wait for no man.”

“This here b-b—BE PIRATE COVE—be a landlocked state. The only tide yer like to find is in the d-d-detergent-t-t aisle.”

If that was one of his pirate-jokes, it was one she’d never heard before. She laughed politely and kept going.

“Never was any g-g-good at the nice-guy muck,” she heard him mutter and then he called, “Ye have t-t-to the count of I ain’t-t-t counting and then I run ye d-d-down.”

When she fumbled her way back into the room, he was waiting, arms folded and eyepatch up, knowing she’d be back. “Come here,” he said. “I ain’t-t-t going to h-h-hurt ye, but I ain’t going to holler at ye all night-t-t-t either. Come here.”

She took a step. Only one.

His eyes narrowed. “I said, c-c-c-come here. D-d-d-down where I can see ye clear. Me eyes may not be wh-wh-what they were, but me l-l-legs are just fine, so c-c-come here or I’ll c-c-come and get ye.”

Not without reservation, but curious, Ana obeyed, picking her way down the steep amphitheater stairs all the way to the foot of the stage. 

He hunkered down to squint at her, his head cocked so the brighter of his two eyes was aimed at her more fully. Up close, it was easy to see the thick cataract of dust overlying his left eye, with darker stains in round dots and drips. Probably got splashed with pizza sauce before this place closed and never cleaned. 

“Hold this,” said Ana, passing up the lantern. 

He took it without hesitation, only to look at it with his ears up, as if surprised by his own compliance.

Ana opened the back flap of her pack for one of the few alcohol wipes she had left over after cleaning Bonnie out. “Now hold still,” she said, reaching up.

He jerked back, raising his hook in what could be mistaken for an aggressive motion before she realized it was probably just to take the sharp point out of any little kid’s easy reach. His ears snapped a few times as the alcohol pad neared his eye, but he held still while she wiped the lens of the camera. The pad came away black. She folded it over, wiped his other lens, folded it again, and swabbed the rubbery caps of his eyes for good measure. The white one got whiter, but the yellow one just got cleaner. Whatever stained it had had too much time to set in.

“How’s that?” she asked, tucking the used wipe into her pocket (like anyone would notice if she added more trash to the floor). “Better?”

“Aye,” he said slowly, lowering his hook. He looked at it, turning his wrist this way and that to catch the light from his glowing eyes—noticeably brighter—and then at her. “So yer Ana,” he said, then jerked and spat out, “WHAT KIND O’ NAME BE THAT FOR A PIRATE? Blasted thing, wear d-d-down, won’t ye?” he muttered, rubbing at his throat.

“I’m Ana.” She put her hand out for the lantern and was amused when he offered his hook for a shake. It was cold and very solid. “He showed you too, huh? That was supposed to be private.”

“Had to sh-sh—SHOW’S STARTING IN PIRATE C-C-C—show someone. C-Couldn’t read-d-d-d it where ye put-t-t it.” It seemed there was more he wanted to say about that, but after opening his mouth, he just closed it again and looked her over some more. “Do I know ye?”

“No.”

He moved the lantern higher and closer to her, squinting. “Ye look-k-k familiar. Ye sure I never—NEVER SURRENDER!—never saw ye-e-e before?”

“Never. First time we met, you pointed a sword at me.”

“Aye, well…” He rolled his shoulders, more fluidly than the other animatronics, almost a human gesture. “I be a p-p-pirate. That be no more’n how we say hello.”

“How do you say goodbye?”

“Same way, only the p-p-point goes a bit d-d-deeper.”

That was another one she’d never heard before. Just why she found that so unsettling, she didn’t know. It was a new restaurant. It only stood to reason the animatronics had some new material.

“I’d swear I knows ye,” Foxy muttered, scratching his hook against the side of his snout. After a moment, he set the lantern on the stage to one side (very much within his reach and out of hers) and gestured toward the amphitheater benches. 

Ana shrugged and backed up to take a seat, front row, center stage. Although the bench complained, it held her weight for the moment. She tried very hard not to picture how it would be to fall through it into the mother of all rats’ nests, which was almost certainly what was filling the dead space beneath these stadium seats, and pictured it anyway. 

“So where’s that bottle of rum?” she asked, gingerly making herself comfortable.

He jerked again. “ _OH FOR A BOTTLE O’ RUM, I’D SELL ME OWN MUM,_ ” he sang, then jerked harder, hooking at the curtains and tearing them a little before he could seem to stop. He shook his head, not to say no, but more like a dog (or a fox) throwing off water, and looked at her again. “Afraid the c-c-cap—CALL ME CAPTAIN FOX—captain’s bottle been empty these m-m-many years, l-l-lass.”

“So, you brought me here under false pretenses.”

He tapped his hook against his chest. “Pirate.”

“Well, never mind.” She set her bag down and opened the front flap, feeling around in the dark until she found the extra-tall pill bottle with the puffy sticker on the cap. “I can make do with this,” she told him, tapping out a joint.

“YAR, THIS HERE BE A TOBACCO-FREE PORT,” Foxy warned as she lit up. 

“It ain’t tobacco, Captain.” She pulled in a lungful, held it, and blew it out at the ceiling. “Anyway, so what if it was? Who’s here to complain?”

“Freddy won’t-t-t like it. He has his rules.”

“You’re a pirate,” she reminded him, and quoted part of his act from all those many years ago: “You follow the tide, not rules.”

The innocent observation triggered another of those spasms and he started singing again. “ _OH FOR A B-B-BOTTLE O’ RUM, I’D SELL ME OWN MUM. I WERE BORN UNDER BLACK CLOTH AND BONES. GIVE ME ROLLING SEAS AND A STIFF BRINY BREEZE, FOR ME SHIP BE MY ONLY HOME!_ ”

Ana smoked and sang along. After the first verse, Foxy quit twitching and stuttering, and if he finished out the song with his ears drooping and that look of resignation stamped onto his plastic features, it was still kind of fun to finally sing along with Captain Fox.

“How sick of that song are you?” Ana asked when they came to the end.

He cocked his head and as he did, his jaw went crooked and slipped the left hinge. He reached up with his hook and snapped it back into place with an ease that bespoke a lot of practice. “I am, ye know,” he said, as if he were himself only just realizing it. “Sick to d-d—DAVY JONES.”

“That’s too bad,” she said and meant it. “It’s a fun song and you look good singing it. Sound good,” she corrected, grinning at herself and the blush she could feel rising in her cheeks. “Jeez, it really has been awhile.”

“Since ye s-s-s-seen the show?”

“Yes and no. Mostly no. I’ve never been here before…before the last time, I mean. Whenever that was. I never came here as a kid, is what I’m trying to say. I’ve never been to any of the Freddy’s.” And if she was having this much trouble getting that thought into words, she was clearly high enough, but she still had half the joint left, so she might as well smoke it. “Do you ever miss it?” she wondered, watching smoke rise in calligraphic plumes that could almost be read.

‘It’ could have meant a lot of things, but he understood.

“Sometimes. The k-k-k-kids m-m-main—HOIST THE MAINSAILS—mostly. I ain’t th-the fatherly sort, not-t-t like Freddy—”

Ana choked on a drag and coughed it out, laughing. Yeah, right. Freddy was fatherly like Melanie Stark had been motherly.

“—but k-k-kids are so unapolog-g-getically ruthless, it be har-r-r—YAR!—hard not to like ‘em, especial-ly-ly when I c-c-can send ‘em home if they start to p-p-piss me off. And the l-l-light.” He glanced at the lantern, his gaze lingering before returning to her. “I m-m-m-miss the light. Ye l-l-live in the dark l-l—LONG JOHN SILVER—long enough and it st-st-starts to live in y-y-y-ye.”

“Yeah. Very true. Still, there’s no law saying you have to stay here forever, is there?”

“Aye, as a m-m-matter o’ fact. I be a pirate and th-th—THIS HERE BE PIRATE COVE.”

“So? I’ve seen you leave the Cove before. At least,” she amended, frowning at her memories, “I’ve seen you leave the stage and walk around the room at the other place. And you must have done your share of parties.”

His lenses opened and snapped shut, making his eyes flicker. “Aye,” he said. “And th-th-then some.” His head cocked. “Ye say ye never s-s-saw the show, but ye sang along with me-e- _eeeee_ —” He smacked his throat. “—with me just-t-t fine. Now ye say ye s-s-seen me leave the stage, but ye’ve never b-b-been to Freddy’s. Ye maybe want to get yer s-st-story straight and t-t-try again?”

“It’s all true. I’ve seen you, but you never saw me. I was never there to see.”

“Riddles.”

“Like the riddle of the wandering pirate.” She raised her joint to him in salute and took another puff. “Can you leave the stage or not?”

“Aye, af-f-fter me set, or if F-F-Freddy calls me out. Then th-the whole of the Cove be mine.” He ran his gaze around the empty room. “Chase the k-k-kiddies through the maze…let some of the braver lads—and lasses, these days—tap at m-m-me with their plastic swords…chat up-p-p the shy ones. But the sh-sh-show starts at the t-top of the hour,” he finished with a diffident shrug. “Had to be b-b-back in me cabin before then.”

“So you never get to leave the Cove?”

“Not in the d-d-daytime.” His expression could not physically change. Nevertheless, it did. “Rules b-b-be different after dark-k-k.”

“All the rules?”

“Some of ‘em. Some of ‘em c-c-can’t be changed.” His ears flicked and turned, listening to the quiet. “Which were ye meaning?”

“Bonnie talks.”

“Aye, and?”

“I thought it was just because I was, you know…”

“Tired?” he suggested, with a narrow-eyed knowing stare at her joint.

“But I was straight as an arrow when I walked in here tonight and he was talking. Is it just because it’s dark? You all talk different after dark? Except you all don’t,” she realized before he had a chance to answer. “Chica’s just the same, day or night. And so is Freddy. Maybe. I don’t know. Freddy’s weird.”

“Aye. Rules d-d-don’t always apply to F-F-Freddy.”

“Why not? Or why him, I guess I should say?”

He shrugged. “I d-d-didn’t write ‘em, did I?”

Which was another way of her subconscious pointing out that it couldn’t supply her with answers she didn’t have. Which was funny in its own right, because although the pot was working, she didn’t feel all that high. A little floaty, sure—she worked for Rider because she owed him and she liked him, but she smoked Rider because his shit was the finest in the fucking world—but not ‘revelations out of a talking fox’ high.

She smoked, watching him watch her and thinking of all the things that were different in the dark. But the personalities she invented and projected onto the animatronics were funny, weren’t they? The first time she’d seen him, Foxy had been menacing, a proper foil for her misplaced anger; now here he was, keeping her easy company. Chica was probably the only one saying and doing exactly what Ana perceived of her. Everyone else got filtered through Ana’s head and came out the way she thought she needed them to be. And yet, they still maintained some separate self-interpretation; Freddy was apparently fatherly, in spite of the fact that Ana made him out to be so hostile. Or maybe that was just what she thought a parent ought to be.

“So wh-wh-what— _WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A DRUNKEN SAILOR?_ What brings ye back to port, lass?” Foxy amended, shaking his head.

“Port? What happened to, ‘This here be a landlocked state?’”

“Ye know what I m-m-mean.”

“I do, and you know I love it when you talk like a pirate, but don’t you ever get tired of doing it, like, all the goddamn time?”

His arms dropped to his sides and his eyepatch went to half-mast (see, she was doing it too!) in a world-weary Foxy-stare. “Aye,” he said. “But it’s how th-they made me. I c-c-can’t sail but on the c-c-course they set.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“It ain’t-t-t like an accent ye c-c-can lose. It be an immutable object-t-t.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Eh, that b-b-be programmer’s talk for functions in me core p-p-programming what can’t be modified or ref-f-factored after construct. Aye, laugh it up-p-p,” he said wryly as she did just that. “I be aware that-t-t sounds fucking hilarious when I says it. That be the p-p-p—POINT O’ ME SWORD, YE SCURVY—point. Everything I says c-c-come out pirate and there ain’t-t-t nothing I can do about it. I can’t refactor me sp-speech patterns. It be an immutable object.”

“Good thing you do it so well, then, huh?”

“As long as I b-b-been doing it now, I d-d-damned well ought to.” His head cocked. “Ye d-d-didn’t answer me question. Why are y-y-ye here?”

“Oh, I fixed up Bonnie’s face and brought it back to him.”

“Did ye?” Surprise shifted the few moving parts of Foxy’s face, then he uttered a robotic snort and shook his head. “Why?”

“Oh come on. How would you like it if you had to go around all…uh…”

He rather pointedly looked down at himself and up at her again. “B-B-Broken?”

“The dude had no face.”

“Some might c-c-c—CALL ME CAPTAIN FOX—call that an improvement.”

“You’re mean,” she said, grinning.

“Naw, lass, I’m a p-p—PIRATE! YAR! It’s a g-g-g—GREAT DAY TO BE A—good thing ye b-b-b-brought it back,” he mused, rubbing his hook over the side of his muzzle. “He was p-p-plenty upset ye t-took it.”

“Was he?” Her good buzz warped with a little rush of unexpected guilt. She hadn’t even asked. She’d just taken it. And poor Bonnie, really, because it was all he had left, like Freddy and his hat. 

“Oh aye. And Freddy was right-t-t raging. You’re lucky to be st-standing here in yer bones, lass. He were out fer yer blood.”

“Yeah, sure.” She shook her head and had another drag. “Don’t let the graffiti around here fool you, Captain. Freddy’s a teddy.”

“Aye, ye j-ju-just keep telling yerself th-that. He’s s-sp-spilled enough b-b-blood in this place to p-p-paint it, inside and out-t-t.”

Ana puzzled over that a moment, then decided either she hadn’t heard it or he’d forgotten what they were talking about and blipped back to some piratey part of his programming. She said, “I only took it to fix it.”

“Ye fo-fo—FOLLOWING SEAS—forgot to tell him.” 

Indignation welled at the idea of having to ask an animatronic’s permission to take his broken parts away for fixing, sinking back again as she realized, even stoned, that it was just as ridiculous to fix it in the first place. Either they had feelings or they didn’t, and obviously they didn’t, but if she was going to project her childish fantasies on them, she had to take the bad with the good. “Well…sorry,” she mumbled. “I guess.”

“Tell him, n-n-not me.”

It was her turn to snort. “Yeah, on the grand scale of apologies owed, he owes me a lot more than I owe him. I spent days patching that face and hours putting it on for him and he grabbed my ass twice and didn’t even say thank you. Not for…grabbing my ass, I mean for the face part. Hang on,” she muttered, taking the last drag left in her joint before crushing the corpse under her shoe. She told herself she’d had enough, but as she was moving her pack from the bench to the floor, the bottle of extra-strength Rider-brand aspirin fell out. Fate. She helped herself, lit up and lay down on the bench, looking up at the seagulls suspended in the dark. “I keep thinking we’re making a real connection, him and me, but he got his face on and he was gone. Not a word. It’s like…fuck it,” she mumbled. “What do I expect? Roses?”

“Ye ain’t sl-sl-s-s-sleeping here, are ye?”

“No. Why, is that against the rules?”

“Well, it ain’t-t-t smart, that’s for damn sure.”

“Relax, I’m just getting a crick in my neck looking up at you, Captain. Front row is too close. God, I’m old. When did that happen?”

“Happens to the b-b-best of us, lass.” He dropped to one knee there at the edge of the stage, still towering over her, but not as much. “And th-the worst.”

“Hmm. He was a mess,” she said drowsily, her eyes moving down along Foxy’s chest and over his arms. “Bonnie, I mean. I did what I could for him, but he’s…pretty bad.”

He looked down at himself again, this time scratching at the cracks in his skin with his hook. 

“Yeah, but it looks good on you,” she assured him. “You’re a pirate. And every pirate worth his hat has a scar and a story to tell, right?” She had herself a puff and said curiously, “What happened to your hat? You used to have one, didn’t you? With a big red feather in it?”

“AYE. I PULLED THAT FEATHER FROM THE F-F-FIRENZE FIRE-B-BIRD-D-D,” he said, his ears going flatter and flatter as he stuttered harder. “GATHER ‘ROUND, SWABBIES, AND I’LL T-T-T-TELL YE THE TALE!”

“Heard it,” said Ana as Foxy interrupted himself with a few hard shakes of his head. “It’s a good story, but I bet it’s not as good as the one about how you lost your hat. What was it?” she asked, letting her eyes slide shut for a moment, just for a moment. “Blew off in a typhoon and taken out to sea? Snatched off by the tentacle of a giant squid as it grabbed your ship in its gruesome coils?” She pictured that against the back of her eyelids, then sighed. “Except it was just some punkass kid who broke in and stole it, huh?”

“Aye,” said Foxy in a less good-natured growl. “Scuttled him proper for it, the son of a b-b—BILGERAT. Eh, close enough. Could have b-b-buried all the p-p-p—PIECES O’ EIGHT—pieces I left him in that b-b-blasted hat.”

“So did you get it back?” she wondered.

“Eh?”

“The hat. After the scuttling and all, did you at least get your hat back?”

Servos clicked and hummed as she smoked. “Didn’t w-w-want it back after th-th-that.” 

“That’s too bad. You looked good in it. Inappropriate as it may be for me to admit it. You want to hear a secret? You were my first crush.”

“Oh aye?” His fan wheezed extra hard, followed by a world-weary chuckle, stuttering and robotic. “Eh, ye w-w-wouldn’t be the only one.”

“I’ll bet.” With effort, Ana got her eyes open long enough to wink at him, then closed them again. “I was just a kid, what the hell did I know? My mom didn’t date and she sure didn’t like my dad very much, so the whole concept of _why_ people marry was utterly alien to me, but at the same time, it was something grown-ups had to do. I thought about getting a job and a car and a house exactly the same way. There was no emotion attached, you know? It was like a chore or maybe a law I was afraid of breaking. I desperately wanted to marry David, because he was the only boy I really knew, and I was so grateful we were friends, because the idea of having to marry someone who hated me the way my mom hated my dad was terrifying to me.”

Foxy said nothing, but his ears came up and she got the distinct impression he was listening…thanks to the pot, which was the same reason she was gabbling on like this in the first place.

“So I had my plan. I’d grow up and marry David. I was fine with that, but it was just that, you know. Fine. He was my best friend and I loved him, but I was a kid. I loved hamburgers and dinosaurs exactly the same way. But then I’d watch you and you were…what’s the word I want? Dashing. That’s it. I mean, Bonnie was cool and Freddy was dapper as hell in that hat, but you, now. No comparison. You were dashing and dangerous, but in a G-rated way. And I was every dumb little girl that ever fell hard for a pirate. _Oh gather ‘round ye young maidens,_ ” she sang sleepily. “ _I’ll have ye take warning by me. For I loved a jolly young sailor, who loved only the raging sea._ ”

The song went on, but only in her mind, spiraling out through verses and choruses only half-remembered. She listened, smiling, in the dark.

Silence for a long moment, then: “Ye s-sl-sleeping, lass?”

“No,” she said, but didn’t open her eyes. “Just thinking.”

“Ab-b-bout?”

“You. You were my first crush.” She remembered her joint and took a drag, still without opening her eyes. “And my first broken heart. I know it’s not your fault. I know that now. I swear I do. But the things you believe as a kid…they never really leave you.”

He grunted. Not the same sound file as Freddy’s grunt, but something piratey and uniquely his own.

“It was my introduction to the wonderful world of how it feels when the person you loved more than anything not only never loved you back, but never even knew you existed. And David was gone. David was gone.” She lapsed into quiet, not thinking anymore, but almost remembering—a memory of a memory, as it were. “I had no one to marry me anymore.”

She drowsed, listening to his internal mechanisms whirring and clicking. There was an intermittent thumping somewhere overhead, a low metallic scrape that came and went. Something in the ventilation shaft. Raccoons, maybe. That had to be taken care of. People thought raccoons were so fucking cute, but they were nothing but rabies factories, shitting and breeding and dying up inside the walls. Probably whole nests of bones up there, blowing histoplasmosis spores out of every vent. She was breathing it in right now, in fact. If she did nothing else, she had to clear out that shaft. And then fix the lights. 

“Roof has to come first,” she mumbled. “Doesn’t do any good if the roof caves in. Need to find out where the load-bearing walls are. And that means…that means…something. Wiring. Plumbing. You understand, Captain. Everything has to be done before I can even think about doing anything. What can you do?”

“Only what ye c-c-can d-d-d—DO WHAT YE WANT.”

“Because a pirate is free,” she agreed and somewhere between her saying that and the tide coming in to wash her out to sea, she guessed she must have fallen asleep. 

Foxy watched her for a short time, then switched off her lantern and climbed down from the stage. He took what was left of her joint from between her loose fingers and brought it toward his face. His fans turned, pulling wisps of smoke in through his fanged mouth. He studied the glints of fire among the dried matter as threads of smoke spun themselves out through his shoulders, elbows, and the holes in his chest. At last, with a chuckle, he pinched it out, set the unsmoked half on the bench beside her and left the Cove.

# * * *

The mirror in the bathroom had been broken a long time ago and the little shard that still clung to the wall was grimed over and corroded. Didn’t matter. Bonnie stared into it anyway, watching the purplish blur that was his hand probe at the pale blur that was his face. His face. Didn’t even matter that those were the fucking rooster’s eyes, he had a face again. And when he got his hands on Ana, he was going to use that face to give her the strangest kiss of her entire life.

But when he shambled back into the dining room, all he saw was Freddy, helping Chica navigate the stage steps. Bonnie peered into the kitchen, but no Ana. Even her toolbox and duffel bag were gone.

“Wh-Wh-Where-re did-d-d-d she g-g-g—GANG, LET’S GO!—go?” he asked, limping over to offer Chica another hand.

She took it gratefully, tapping at the edge of each step before letting herself drop blindly onto it. Poor Chica. The servos in her knees had locked up years ago and now her hips were going, too. None of them had said so, but they all knew—when that happened, she’d be frozen, unable to walk at all. 

“HOME,” said Freddy after clicking through a number of sound files to hunt down that particular word. “IT’S. LATE.”

“What-t-t? No, it’s not-t-t!” Bonnie checked his internal clock. “It’s b-b-barely one o’clock!”

“THAT’S. LATE. SHE. SLEEPS. AT. NIGHT. MOST. PEOPLE. DO.”

“I th-th-thought she’d sl-e-e-e- _eeeeeee_ —damn it—sleep-p-p-p over ag-g-again. She di-di-d-d-didn’t e-e-e-e- _eeeeeee_ —God damn it!—even s-s-say—SAY WHAT?—say g-g-g-g—”

“KNEE.” Click click, hum, click. “THERE.” Click. “DID. YOU.” And Freddy glared at him.

Bonnie flung out his arms defensively, then had to grab Chica to keep her from falling over. “I th-th-th-th-th-th-th— _Fuck!_ Thought! I th-thought she was staying-ing-ing! I was c-c-c-c-c—COME ON, GANG, LET’S ROCK!—coming right b-b-b—BYE NOW!—back!”

“BE CALM,” said Freddy, still frowning. “SLOW DOWN.”

Bonnie started to say he didn’t need to slow anything down, but got stuck on the d in ‘don’t’ and just shut the hell up for a while. He couldn’t stand talking the way Freddy and Chica did, sifting through playbacks for the right word here, the right word there, a word that was, eh, close enough there, but it wasn’t easy to just talk on his current setting and apart from that weird medical Tourette’s that had been creeping up on him the last few years, it was dangerous. He didn’t feel like a machine most days, but he still was one and he knew any error could be the one that turned into a fatal exception and sent him into the black. One of these days, he’d go in and never come out again. He’d end up like Mangle, locked away where he couldn’t hurt the others, biting at shadows and singing to himself in the dark. 

Taking a break from talking—it took Chica forever to do stairs—did help, though, and when Bonnie said, “When d-d-do you think she’ll come back?” he got it out mostly intact on the first try.

“SHE. WON’T.”

“Well, not t-t-t-tonight, but—”

“SHE. WON’T.”

“COME BACK SOON,” said Chica, finally making it to the floor.

Freddy shook his head and said, a third time, “SHE. WON’T.” And, as angrily as Freddy ever really got anymore, he added, “WHY. W-W-W—WOULD A WOODCHUCK—WOULD. SHE. SHE. HAS.” He paused again, clicking, and finally found, “REAL. FRIENDS.”

“I’m r-r-r—RETICULATED NEURAL PATHWAYS—real, d-d-damn it!”

“DON’T YELL. AT. ME.”

“Well, th-th-then don’t be a d-d-dick!”

Freddy pointed at him. “ENOUGH,” he said and Bonnie felt the shivering electric snap all through his processors that made it impossible to keep arguing. Rule number twenty-nine, Freddy was the leader. When Freddy said enough, it was enough. All he could do was glare.

The door to the West Hall scraped open. Foxy came in, looking up through narrowed eyes as the muted thumping of Mangle somewhere in the ceiling could be heard. “LOOKS LIKE WE’VE GOT COMPANY, MATEYS,” he said.

Freddy looked up as well, instantly on the alert, his ears rotating to catch every sound, trying to determine who was up there with her and where. The hatch in the security office was locked down and armored, but the rest were just regular vents, hinged, no less, built to provide even a one-handed animatronic with easy access. The one in the gymnasium was in easy reach of the top of the rock-climbing wall, where anyone at all could just wriggle on up and get in, and more than one hapless asshole had done just that after breaking in for their abandoned pizza parlor adventure, but all there was to find up in the crawlway was Mangle. 

After the Grand Opening…and the closing ceremony…when it was obvious no one would ever be coming back and they were on their own, Freddy had gone into Kiddie Cove himself and pulled Mangle out before she could think to escape into those very crawlways where she was now contained. He’d put her in the freezer then. It hadn’t been built to hold her, but it was sturdy enough and, more importantly, the door didn’t have a latch on the inside. She’d banged around for a few days, but she hadn’t been able to get out and at last she’d gone quiet. 

Quiet, but not dead. After the Bite of ’97, when she’d been removed from the show as Foxanne and redesigned as Pull-apart Polly, the failsafe that shut them down when their chests were opened had been removed. _He’d_ wanted her to be awake as she was dissembled and mashed together again. Her cooling system had been destroyed over the years, but that didn’t matter without a casing to hold the heat in. Most of her external pumps were also gone, but her internal motors were still intact, allowing just enough movement to keep her battery charging. There was nothing left of her now but an endoskeleton and a few body parts—a foot, a hand, half a tail…and her teeth. And even when Mangle could do nothing else, she could bite.

As she proved when, after half a year safely contained in the freezer, a pack of sorry bastards broke in and opened it. Just what in the hell they’d thought to find in the freezer of some powerless old pizza parlor, Bonnie had no idea, but what they’d got was Mangle. Despite the condition she was in these days, with the right leverage, she could still leap. She had. She’d bit. And as fast as Foxy came running when the screaming started, she had already torn through the lot of them and was loose in the halls before he got there.

There was no getting her back in the freezer after that, no getting her even to the kitchen. It took hours of fighting, all four of them together, but in the end, she’d bolted back to Kiddie Cove, where she’d disappeared up into the crawlway. So that was where they’d left her, after blocking off all the other access vents with old chunks of carpet, books and chairs—anything sufficient to fill the crawlway and conceal the fact that there was a hinged hatch just on the other side—and then closing off the rooms for good measure. And so far, it had been enough. Either Mangle had forgotten where the hatches were or she was happy up there, but in all these years, she’d never tried to get out. The day she did try, things might change, but for now, she was safe up there and the rest of them were safe down here.

But now Foxy had noticed the effect he’d had and was shaking his head. “YAR! Not her. Sorry, mateys. She ain’t-t-t but chasing squirrels. I meant-t-t her.” Foxy twitched hard, his lower jaw rattling on its hinge until he reached up to steady it. He pointed, first with his hook, then turning all the way around to point back at the hall with his good hand. If you could call that a good hand. “Ana.”

Freddy tipped his head forward in a frown. “SHE’S. HERE.”

“Aye, sound asleep-p-p in the Cove.” Foxy laughed. “G-G-Girl’s got no sense at all.”

“I t-t-told you she wouldn’t just g-g-go without saying-ing g-g-g—GREAT JOB!” Bonnie blatted and grabbed at the side of his head, his fingers jabbing at the face whose physical reality he was going to have to get used to all over again. 

“She d-d-did a fair—WIND AND A FOLLOWING—fair job, didn’t she?” Foxy remarked, looking Bonnie over, then shrugged. “Given th-th-the ugly m-m-mug she had to work-k-k with.”

“You’re one to talk, Fra-ank-k-kenfox.” Bonnie ducked around Chica and set off limping down the hall to Pirate Cove.

There she was, stretched out on the front row bench. She raised an arm as he stared at her, shading her face from the light of his eyes, then rolled over and pressed her face to the back of the bench. Her knees drew up until she was curled like a kitten, nose under paws, her shirt riding up in back just enough to show a tantalizing stripe of skin. After a moment, she began to snore.

Foxy dropped his hook over Bonnie’s shoulder. Bonnie shrugged it off twice, then gave in and let himself be led back out to the hall just as Freddy and Chica were catching up to them.

“You said she went-t-t home,” he said accusingly.

“I THOUGHT. SHE. DID.” Freddy moved past them to get his own look at her, coming back a minute later with a confused expression on his plastic features. “SHE. SAID. SHE. WAS. LEAVING.”

“Aye, she w-w-was.” Foxy shrugged and folded his arms. “But we got to t-t-t—TELLING TALES O’—talking. What d’ye think of th-that?” he asked Chica. “I p-p-pulled a sword on her and she wants t-t-to chat.”

“GIRLS CAN BE BRAVE, TOO.”

Foxy snorted. “There b-b-be a fine line t-t-twixt fearless and foolish, lass, and methinks ye p-p-put her on the wrong side.”

“What’s to b-b-be afraid of?” Bonnie grumbled, glaring at Freddy. “We’re not-t-t even real.”

“DON’T. START. WITH. ME.”

“I LOVE TO MAKE NEW FRIENDS,” said Chica hopefully.

Freddy shot her an annoyed glance, his eyes beginning to flash. “SHE. CAN’T. BE. OUR. FRIEND.”

“Wh-Why not?” Bonnie demanded, jumping on the opportunity to start a new fight since the old one had been enoughed.

Freddy looked at him and now his eyes were flashing fast and bright. “SHE’LL. GET. HURT.”

“Oh, c-c-c-come on. She’s not going to d-d-do anything. We can p-push some of this sh-sh-sh-sh—SURE IS A GREAT DAY FOR PIZZA—shit out of the way and m-m-make it a little easier for her-r-r-r to get in and out-t-t without advertising-ing-ing it.”

“HE,” said Freddy as the Toreador March began to grind out of him. “WILL. HURT. HER.”

Chica looked away, tapping her hands together. Foxy paced to the other end of the corridor and looked back in at the Cove. Bonnie drew his hands into fists and glared back at Freddy, refusing to drop his eyes. Brewster’s eyes. Whatever.

“He c-c-c-can’t get out,” he said.

“YOU. DON’T. KNOW. THAT.” 

“I know he h-h-h-hasn’t been out since th-th-the place closed-d-d.”

“HE. HAS. NOT. HAD. A. CHANCE.” Freddy cocked his head, his eyes narrowed to angry wedges. “I. WON’T. LET. HER. GIVE. HIM. ONE.”

“The power’s off. The d-d-doors can’t open. What c-c-could she do?”

“LET. HER. GO.” Freddy’s angry eyes evened out. The flashing faded. He said, “I. KNOW. YOU. LIKE. HER. BUT. SHE. DOESN’T. BE. LONG. HERE.”

Bonnie took two lurching steps forward, shoving his cracked, patched face right up in Freddy’s, and snarled, “Neither d-d-d-do I, God d-d-d-damn it!” 

Freddy did not move fast very often anymore, but in the very next instant, his huge hands were on Bonnie’s shoulders and Bonnie’s back hit the hallway wall hard enough to crack through the tiles. He pinned him there easily, waiting out Bonnie’s twitching, futile struggles as they grew more and more uncontrolled, until inevitably it all went black.

When he came out of it, he and Freddy were both right where they’d been, but Chica had retreated almost as far as the gift shop and Foxy was back in the mouth of the corridor, his good hand on his sword, as if he were guarding the Cove. Or guarding the girl in the Cove. Guarding her like she was his.

Bonnie went black again, that fast. The second time he came out, there was a little greyish pre-dawn light coming through the boarded windows. Dazed, he looked at them, then at Freddy.

Freddy pointed at him. “THAT. IS. WHY. SHE. CAN’T. STAY,” he said, as quietly as his broken playbacks allowed. “THAT. IS. WHY. YOU. SHOULDN’T. WANT. HER. TO.” His pointing hand lowered and his eyelids fell. He looked tired. “IF. HE. DOESN’T. HURT. HER. WE. WILL,” he said. “SOONER. OR. LATER. WE. ALWAYS. DO.”

Bonnie shook him off and Freddy let himself be shaken, giving Bonnie room as he brushed plastic strands of dirty brown fur off his shoulders. Then he turned, too fast, wheeling into the wall and bouncing off it before he stomped away. Chica followed him a little ways, but not far. There wasn’t much point in chasing after him when he couldn’t really go anywhere.


	11. Chapter 11

# CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ana had never forgotten anything so entirely as she’d forgotten falling asleep at Freddy’s. When her phone rang the next morning, she not only did not remember she was in Pirate’s Cove, she didn’t even remember she was in Mammon. She rolled over, reaching out for the charging port she kept on the nightstand in her room all the way back in Oxtongue, and fell off the bench onto a clammy, very hard floor.

“Ow, what the fuck!” she said, flailing in the perfect blackness in which she found herself, and striking only alien chunks of nothing known to her.

Her phone rang again, reminding her of its existence. She found her pack by the noise and fumbled the thing out as much for its light as to answer it, and put it on speaker with a baffled, “Who is this? What time is it? Where am I?” as she aimed its screen at her surroundings. A stage. A curtain. The stadium-style benches. 

Oh yeah.

“This is Lee Shelton, over at Shelton Contractors.”

“5:50?” Ana read, looking at her phone’s screen. “Is that right? Holy shit, man, I better have slept straight through to the evening or I’m starting the day with an ass-kicking!”

“Well now, missy, maybe I got the wrong number. I thought you were looking for work. In this line of business, this is a late start.”

“What sort of work?” she asked, boosting herself back up on the bench and rubbing her elbow, which had come out the worse for being fallen on. “For what sort of pay?”

“I got what you might call an urgent job this morning and I find myself a man down. If you’re still interested, I can offer you fifteen an hour for a day’s work, all cash, free and clear of Uncle Sam. Sound good to you?”

“I was hoping for a more permanent arrangement.”

“I do believe Gallifrey’s is looking for a part-time waitress to help out with the summer crowd. That might be a bit more your speed, missy. I can’t afford to run a charity here, but you do something close to a man’s work and we may talk again next time I find myself light. When can you be here?”

The curtains rustled. Foxy stuck his head out, lighting her up better than the phone. She waved at him, saying, “That depends. I’m not at home. If you need me daisy-fresh, I need an hour to go home and grab a shower. If you don’t, I can be there in ten minutes.”

“Seeing as how the emergency call of which I speak is a busted septic tank and you, little missy, will be in it up to your hips, I don’t suppose daisy-fresh is of particular importance this morning.” A tactful pause. “Still interested?”

“Yeah,” she said sourly. “Money is money and shit washes off.”

“True enough.” Another pause, longer than the first. “You mind if I ask how it is you don’t seem to know where you are? You only been in town a few weeks. Isn’t it a little soon not to know where you’re bedding down?”

“Are you going to be shocked when I tell you that’s none of your business?”

“Nope. You going to be shocked when I tell you if I don’t get an answer, you’re not on my crew today or any other day? Not that I’m electing myself morals police, but this is a church-going community and I got to be sure of the people that work under me, even if they work under the table, so to speak. I will not hire on a scandal in a skirt.”

“I don’t wear skirts.” Too late, Ana realized that was the wrong insult to address. Rolling her eyes, she said, “Fine. You said you knew my cousin?”

“I remember him.” A pause. “Went away to live with his dad, we heard. His momma took it hard.”

“Yeah, well, so did I. He was my best friend when we were little and losing him like that, there one day and just gone the next…I never got over that. So I went out last night to a place—” Ana looked around Pirate Cove, her eyes coming back to Foxy’s more than once, but unable to meet his stare for long. He looked too much like he was listening. “—where he was happiest. I thought…I’d feel close to him. I didn’t follow anyone home, I just fell asleep in a weird place because I was missing my best friend. You feel like an asshole yet?”

“Little bit,” Shelton said evenly.

“Good, because you’re not my father or my husband and I’ll sleep wherever and with whoever I want.”

Foxy’s head cocked. 

Shelton let a significant pause pass to give her time to regret her unladylike demeanor, but she didn’t, and he said, “Well now, if you don’t mind working for an asshole, you got a job today, but keep in mind that I may not be your husband or your father, but when you’re on the clock, I am your boss and you’ll show me respect. Got that?”

“I seriously doubt you’re this interested in who the rest of your crew is fucking, boss,” Ana snapped, then took a cooling breath and said, “But yeah, I got it.”

“Then be here in ten, missy, and come ready to get dirty.”

He hung up without waiting for an answer, but Ana kept her phone in hand for the light. She swept it along the stage first, then around the floor in front of the stage, and finally up at Foxy. “Where’s my lantern?”

Foxy leaned back behind the curtain and looked at something out of her sight, then back at her. “No idea.”

“I get the feeling you’re lying to me, Captain.”

He gave the cracked front of his chest a tap with the curve of his hook. “Pirate.”

“Uh huh. Fine, keep it. I’ll get another one.” She stood, stretching her stiff joints one at a time. “I did not mean to stay the whole night. I was only going to rest my eyes for a second. Why did I sleep so damn long?”

He twitched hard and barked out, “YE F-F-F-FERGOT TO SET YER ALARRRRM CLOCK!” and shook himself off in that dog/water way, gripping at his head with his furless hand and muttering under his breath.

“Alarrrrm clock?” she repeated, wincing. 

“Aye.”

“That’s the worst pirate joke I’ve ever heard.”

“Ye ain’t-t-t heard many then, have ye?” He shook his head again and looked at her. “It’s late. I got to b-b-be getting to me cabin and make r-r-r—READY TO SAIL—ready for the show. Will I b-b-b-be seeing ye again, lass?”

“I don’t know,” she said, because she didn’t have the heart to say no, not even to a stupid robot. “Maybe. Goodbye, Captain. You don’t have to say goodbye back at me. I know how you pirates do that.”

He raised his hook, already turning back to his ship. “FAIR WINDS AND A F-F-FOLLOWING S-S-SEA.”

“And to all me little hearties, sail on,” Ana finished for him, climbing the amphitheater steps.

“That just-t-t sounds silly when ye say it. C-C-Come see me if ye find yerself in port-t-t,” he said, letting the curtain drop so that his voice came, muffled, out of nowhere and everywhere at once. “WE’LL PASS A BOTTLE OF RUM AND TELL EACH OTHER TALES O’ THE SEA, or t-t-talk, d-d-damn it,” he grumbled as his footsteps receded. “We c-c-could just talk.”

Holding her phone out in front of her as a flashlight, she picked her way back up through the junk to the door and squeezed through into the hall. The sun was just thinking about coming up, throwing a soft grey light through the boarded up windows. Ana put away her phone and picked up her toolbox, abandoned here at the feet of the waiter-cat.

Clanking footsteps. She looked down the hall and saw Bonnie coming out of the dining room. He saw her. Looked at her anyway. No…he saw her.

“Looking good, my man,” she told him. “Bye, Bonnie.”

“BYE NOW! No, w-w-wait!”

She ducked under the boards and out the door into a misty morning. She could see purple moving through the windows as he came lurching up the hall after her, but she’d spent all her fake-conversation time on Foxy. She tossed her stuff in on the passenger seat, put one leg up on the runner, and Bonnie punched through the door—glass, boards and all.

“Ana,” he said, bending stiffly over to put his new eyes up to the hole he’d made. “Wait. C-C-COME BACK SOON. It’s almost-t-t s-s-s— _LITTLE OWLETS SIX_ —six o’cl-cl-cl-clock. I can’t-t-t talk-k-k long. Please. COME BACK—please.”

She didn’t have time for this, but some things you made time for. 

Ana stepped back and went to him. He opened the broken door, pushed on the boards, held out his hand, but she wasn’t coming in. “Come here,” she said. “Show me that handsome face.”

Slowly, he straightened up, then bent and pushed his cracked muzzle up to the hole. “COME BACK SOON. Ana, tell me you’ll c-c-c—COME BACK—tonight. Okay?”

“I can’t. Close your eyes, my man.”

“No. No, you’ll leave.”

She smiled. “You knew I was. You sang it with me, remember? _Oh, I’m still leaving in the morning and I’m leaving you behind. But before I do_ …close your eyes.”

He did, ears jittering noisily on their pins, and Ana leaned in and kissed him through the splintered boards and broken glass. He tasted of fresh glue and old plastic. He still smelled of solder.

“What-t-t are you doing?” he asked, the flocking on his lower jaw abrading her lips. “Are you s-st-still there? Say something-ing.” 

“I’m kissing you goodbye,” she told him. 

His eyes snapped open. “But-t-t just for now, right-t-t? You’re coming-ing-ing back, r-r-r— _RIGHT FOOT IN_ —right?”

“No. This is it, Bon. This is goodbye.” She reached through the hole in the door to cup the side of his face, feeling cracks she hadn’t quite patched smooth. “Tell me goodbye, my man.” 

He looked at her, those green eyes so bizarre to see in his familiar face and yet so completely his own, and said, “No.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

“You don’t want this to be the way you remember us ending,” she said, putting her face right up to the hole in the door. “Don’t you want to kiss me?”

“Not g-g-goodbye,” he said and his voice crackled through his speakers. 

“I know what you’re thinking. You think if you don’t say it, I won’t be gone, not really. And I won’t,” she said with a soft, unhappy laugh. “You are absolutely right. In fact, if you close your eyes so you don’t see me walk away, that’ll help even more. You can make it seem like I never really left, but I won’t be there either. And twenty years from now, that space you think you’re keeping open for me is going to be too big and too full of all the things you never said to ever close up again. So tell me goodbye, Bon, because as much as it hurts, it’s the goodbyes you never said that hurt the most.”

But he didn’t and she couldn’t wait any longer. Reaching through the door, she touched his hand, then turned away. He called her name, but she didn’t look back. The restaurant was closed. She swung up behind the wheel of her truck and got the hell out of there while she still had a job to go to.

# * * *

One day slogging in a shithole did not net much in the way of actual money, but it did seem to convince Lee ‘call-me-Shelly’ Shelton that Ana wasn’t all talk. Over the next three weeks, he called a dozen times and then some, but never offered more than a day’s work and a “We’ll see how it goes,” when she asked for more permanent employment. In the meantime, she concentrated on digging her aunt’s house out from under the pile of miscellaneous cheap shit she had buried it in before vanishing.

Digging was the right word, she decided. What Ana did at the house was not cleaning or even clearing, but excavating. Beneath the salad spinners and ugly sweaters and old calendars and giant novelty mesh stockings stuffed with rawhide bones and catnip mice, Aunt Easter’s house was just how Ana had last seen it. The same old trunks and spare furniture were in the same places in the attic as when she and David had played pirates up there on rainy days. Aunt Easter’s bed was still made up, the lavender comforter tucked tightly around the mattress, although the bed itself had been crushed flat to the floor under the weight of the forty-plus bags of rock salt stacked atop it. Once she cleared the second floor enough to squeeze through to the stairs and down into the ground floor, her archeological expeditions uncovered pieces of the house she remembered buried beneath the invading hoard. None of the furniture in the parlor had survived intact, but the pictures were still on the wall. Several spindles on the curving bannister flanking the grand stairwell had broken and the marble floor in the front foyer had cracked in places, but the rug she and David used to slide on was still there in the hall, along with the rolltop desk and grandfather clock. In the kitchen, the dining room table still had a plate with the mummified remains of a breakfast on it. It was as if the old furniture had formed the base for a giant three-dimensional game of Tetris filled in with cardboard boxes and crap. 

And then there was David’s room, which was, as she’d predicted, hoardless. It was also the only room she’d come across yet that had been locked. In her less-sober moments, these two facts seemed to be connected, but even then, she could not see how. Once she’d picked the lock—all the locks in Aunt Easter’s house were a hundred years, of the old-timey cartoon keyhole variety, and needed no more than a tickle with a small enough probe to pick—and opened the door, she could see that the room was hardly untouched. The closet doors were wide open; David’s clothes had not just been pulled off their hangers and shelves, but seemed to have been thrown around and trampled underfoot. His television—top of the line for 1990, now unbelievably bulky to Ana’s eye—had been smashed, maybe with David’s own gaming consoles, which now filled the cold cavity of the TV set like the stuffing in a Thanksgiving turkey. His computer was missing, leaving his study desk empty and blanketed in dust. His bed was there, Spiderman sheets and Batman blanket rumpled blasphemously together, with the yellow top-hatted teddy bear he swore he’d outgrown lying facedown on the pillow. 

Fredbear, that was its name, she recalled now, but it wasn’t a real Freddy Fazbear plushie, just a stuffed teddy bear in a top hat and bowtie. It had a windup key in its butt, but the music that came tinkling out was not the Toreador March, just some forgotten jingle for this knockoff to work its jaws to. David’s official Freddy Fazbear hat was on the bedpost just as Ana remembered, and there was David’s sword hanging from his belt on the wall…only…that wasn’t David’s sword.

Oh, David had more than one toy sword. He and she had been playing pirates almost as soon as they were both toddling on their feet, and he had amassed an impressive collection. Most were plastic, but his prize had always been a silver-painted wooden thing that went with a Halloween costume he’d long outgrown. That was the sword that should be hanging from the hook above his bed, not this one. This was a cutlass, solid, heavy…real metal. Not sharp, but not a toy either. The grip was wrapped leather, the hilt was tarnished brass. 

All at once, she realized she knew this sword. She’d never had it in her hand before, but she’d seen it. She’d seen it recently, in fact. If not this one exactly, the one it had been modeled after.

It was Foxy’s.

She could not recall David ever telling her he’d challenged Foxy to a duel, but clearly, he had. The swords available in the gift shop at Freddy’s were plastic. There was only one way to get the Captain’s cutlass and that was to cross swords with the Captain himself. No one had ever beat him that Ana knew, but he might still give up his weapon if the kid put up enough of a fight.

Ana had sparred with David a million times. If anyone could have put Foxy on his toes, it was David.

But he hadn’t told her about it and he would have. Foxy was his favorite, a hero and a villain both, his idol and his friend. Ana would have heard the story of that fight a thousand times, seen the blade in David’s triumphant hand, and, in due time and with the proper reverence, held it herself. Unreliable as Ana’s memory was, there was no way she could have forgotten that. Freddy’s hat, for example. She had not touched, seen or thought of that hat in twenty years, but as soon as her eyes hit it, she knew the whole of its history. David had been crushed up for hours against the velvet ropes holding back the giddy crowds on Opening Day at Circle Drive, and how some old man—presumably the restaurant’s owner—had driven up in a limousine. Freddy had opened the doors and come out to meet him. The old man took off his own top hat and gave it to Freddy. Freddy put it on, then took his old hat over to the ropes and, of all the kids screaming and cheering, put it on David’s head. Then some girl in a swimming suit had cut the big red ribbon with the giant-sized scissors and everyone ran inside. She’d heard that story so many times, she couldn’t even remember David telling it; it was just there, rubbed into the grain of her memory so deeply, it could not come out.

But he’d never told her about the sword. Or if he had, it was only the one time. Had they been playing pirates out at the quarry that last time? Possibly. Had David been holding up this sword? Had Ana been dazzled by the light of the sun on its blade, had that been what blinded her to her mother’s approach? Had David won this sword at all or had he stolen it along with the doubloon he’d tried to use to save her life?

Smiling, Ana hung the sword back on its hook. Then she sat down on David’s dusty bed, picked up his fake Freddy bear and cried. And when she was done with that, she put ol’ Fred back on the pillow, facedown as she’d found him, and left the room. She had not been back.

There were too many episodes like that. She had thought, once she got down through the first strata of hoard to the bedrock of house, she would be…well, not _fine_ , but not this. Her focus only lessened as the hoard diminished. When she saw the scratched and stained floorboards in the upstairs hallway, she wanted to see sanding and staining and waxing and buffing, not…not David in his socks, sliding from his room to the bathroom on one running start. The broken sink was where she and David once stood side by side, brushing their teeth before bed. His photos were still on the wall behind cracked glass. His rubber boots were still in the foyer closet, caked with decades’ old dried mud. His comic books, matted together and chewed apart by generations of rats, were still sacred. Everywhere she looked, she saw where David wasn’t, a void that nevertheless cast a shadow—the madness of her aunt, who had dug her only child’s grave inside her own home and filled it in with crap. 

She worked her body to its limits, but exhaustion couldn’t make her sleep. Never mind. The physical strain she endured each day gave her a great excuse to end each night with a Vicodin or two from the little vitamin bottle with the puffy apple sticker on the cap, which in turn made her drowsy enough in the mornings to justify a Ritalin from the vitamin bottle with the puffy peanut sticker on the cap. Her mind grew stupored, disconnected from consequence and emotion, and that was just fine. She didn’t have to think about what she was doing as she tunneled through her aunt’s house, and if sometimes her brain got hung up on old thoughts and unquiet memories, she could always numb it over with Rider’s little pink pills.

So it wasn’t difficult work she did, just erosive…and expensive. The dump trailer needed weekly dumping and the trips to and from the various donation charities were siphoning off her shoebox. As May came to a close and she found herself with half her time gone before a city inspection she was in no way ready for, Ana took the proverbial candy and climbed into the van; she called Rider and asked for work.

He, too, told her he’d see what he could do, but the difference between Shelton and Rider was that Rider didn’t dick around. Six hours later, as Ana was sitting on the edge of the roof overlooking her aunt’s back yard, watching the sun set over the distant quarry with sweat in her eyes and a warm beer in her hands, Rider called back.

“Got a job for you,” he said without preamble. “You got a few weeks free?”

“A few, sure,” said Ana, thinking that might light a fire under ol’ Shelly’s ass if nothing else did. The next time he found himself a man down, he could damn well go back to hiring on his other crewmen’s sons or nephews and see if he didn’t find it in his thick inbred heart to appreciate her just a bit more. “What am I doing?”

“Just what you do, darlin’. Flip a house.”

“You coming out here?” Ana asked, trying hard not to sound as suspicious as she felt.

“Naw, I know how much that’d piss you off. I got a legitimate problem, actually, and you’re gonna fix it for me. Situation is this: I got a friend from way back, back before you, even. We were kids together. Besties, before that was a thing. Then his daddy moved him out to the Bible Belt to get him away from the West Coast’s evil influence, and he quit distributing pot and started cooking meth. I remember being shocked, that’s how long ago this all was,” he interjected with a short laugh. “Anyway, he caught a nickel damn near fresh out the gate, did his time, got out, and just immediately caught a dime. So he’s been away, is what I’m telling you, but he’s been out a few months and getting to know the business again. All of this I’m telling you so you understand why his social graces may be a bit on the rough end.”

“Is he going to keep his hands to himself?”

“He’d fucking better,” said Rider. “I told him you were my pony, so if he tries anything, it’s a slap on you and me both. However, the politics here are a bit…pricklish. The way he looks at it, he and I are best friends going on thirty years and he don’t understand why I won’t bring him out and set him up as joint partner—partner, mind you, not a pony—or, failing that, at least drop my whole damn life and go out there to show him how it’s done in person, not to mention hand over the capital to get him started, as a gift. The way I look at it, he and I were best friends thirty years _ago_ and I don’t work with fools who can’t keep their ass out of prison. On the flip side of that page, my business runs like a well-oiled cash-printing machine with minimum human effort, while he got a crew ten times the size of mine and can’t put two cents together. He don’t understand that either, and he got a long history of shooting what he don’t understand, so I am naturally concerned.”

“This is the man you want me to work with?”

“Correct.”

Ana glanced around at the roof she was sitting on, a roof in serious need of repair, and sighed. “So where are you sending me?”

“Well, that’s the thing, darlin’. I don’t have to send you anywhere.”

“He’s already in Utah?”

“He’s already in Mammon. How’s that for Fate with a capital F?”

Long years of working with Rider kept Ana from saying the first thing that wanted out of her on hearing that, but even after several calming breaths and time to think, she still said, “What the fuck, Rider? With a capital fucking F.”

“See, I knew you were going to react like that. I knew as soon as he told me, I thought, ‘She is never going to believe I did not set this up.’”

“No, I don’t, and I still don’t, so you better drop this what-an-amazing-coincidence act this fucking second and tell me straight why you sent a man you admit is too fucking violent and unpredictable for you to work with _straight to my fucking doorstep_!”

“Woman, you watch the words coming out of your mouth or I will be the one on your fucking doorstep next.”

Ana took a few more breaths, remembered her beer, drank it, and threw the bottle. It hit a tree, but bounced off without breaking and landed with a dull whump in the weeds.

“He’s been bouncing around Texas since he got out,” Rider continued, apparently deciding she was calm and ready to listen. She did listen. She was not calm. “That’s where I thought he still was when I decided to nut up and deal with his ass. But it seems things got a little hot for him down there, and who takes you in when no one else will? Who still believes you’re innocent when you spent half your life in prison and come out with more ink than the Wall Street Journal?”

“So not in the mood for riddles, Rider. Just tell me.”

“He went home to momma. And Momma Kellar lives in Mammon. Has done all her life.”

“Kellar…” Memory hit, slamming down into her with the force of an electric shock. “Holy shit, _the_ Mrs. Kellar? Did she used to teach fifth grade?”

“Fuck if I know. You’ll have to ask him when you see him. Which you’ll do tomorrow.”

“Mrs. Kellar,” Ana marveled. With her legs dangling off the roof, it was easy to recall sitting in one of those plastic school chairs with the chipped wooden tray under her right arm. Mrs. Kellar. Used to keep algebra problems on the blackboard for her ten-year-old students to stare at in hopeless mortification whenever she felt like it. What a bitch. “She had a kid?”

“Had two of them. Mace’s daddy won first pick in the divorce lottery, but Momma got the other one. Met him a few times over the summer, back when I was a kid. Don’t ask me to remember his name for you.”

“Two kids,” marveled Ana. “Someone fucked that old bitch _twice_.”

He gave her a moment to meditate, then interrupted, all business. “So here’s the deal, darlin’. Mace has the house already and he swears his crew can do the work once my pony shows them how, because they, quote, sew their own clothes and all that shit. End quote.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.”

“Yeah, I feel you, but whatever. Yours is not to reason with the guy. Just shake his hand, do your job, show his boys what flipping a lab entails, and collect your pay.”

“Which is going to be what, exactly?”

“Mace’ll be happy to explain in detail how he intends to screw you over, but you just take it up the ass with a smile and shine him on. Whatever he pays you, that’s all icing. You ain’t working for him, darlin’, you’re my pony. You run for me and I’m going to take care of you, you got me?”

“Check.”

“Now, you meet up with Mace tomorrow and if you can work with him, you give me the nod and I’ll set you up with a bank account with, say, one hundred. That’s a nice round number. That ought to allow you to flip whatever shit-heap Mace has and put enough profit in his pocket to get him the fuck off my back for a while. If he wants to pay you for your labor, fine. If he doesn’t, that is also fine. Yours is not to wonder why. At the end of the job, whatever’s left in that account belongs to you, free and clear. Understand?”

“Yeah,” said Ana, looking at the roof and imagining the rooms below. The average cost for a flip these days was running around thirty or forty thousand, but having to train an unknown number of people of unknown ability to learn made for a hell of a variable. Say the job ran fifty—as Rider had just said, that was a nice round number—that left fifty for her. Fifty thousand dollars could take care of this roof, rebuild the porch and at least get a start on the kitchen, which was the ugliest room in the house at the moment and the likeliest reason to fail her upcoming inspection. 

“Now, that’s if you can work with him, and here’s where I need you to listen close and nod your head, darlin’,” Rider said, bringing her out of her distraction. “If you can’t, you don’t. If you meet this man and your alarms start flashing for any reason, you tell him you ain’t qualified and that I’ll be in touch to send him someone who is. Mason knows you’re coming and he knows you’re a she, and while he ain’t happy about either of those things, he knows you’re mine. You’re going to hear some remarks and I expect you to shine them on. If he puts hands on you, you remember you are my pony; you tell him off, but you keep your own hands to yourself, and you let me handle it. If he roughs you over, and keep in mind, I don’t think that’s likely—”

“Likely enough to mention it as a possibility.”

“I don’t know this man,” Rider reminded her. “Last time I saw Mace, he still thought sex meant pissing on a girl’s belly-button so she’d make a baby. And whatever the fuck he learned about sex in prison, I don’t even want to know. So yeah, if he goes for it and don’t take no for an answer, you can handle that however you feel the situation warrants, but I better fucking hear about it. You got me?”

“I got you.”

“I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem,” he said again. “You’re there to do a job and he wants very much to know how that job gets done. He’ll be mouthy and he might get grabby, but he don’t need to wake up to find me at the foot of his fucking bed with wire cutters and a blowtorch and he knows it, so nothing’s gonna happen. You’ll be fine.” A tactful pause followed this reassurance, then Rider said, “So, what do you say, darlin’?”

“I say when and where?”

“That’s my girl.”

An address, a time, and a brief bitch session about how things were going in Westeros, and the conversation ended. Ana looked out across the darkening desert one last time (her eyes had a way of turning south, where Freddy’s sat like black blocks some careless giant child had left on Edge of Nowhere after play), then made her way to the ladder and climbed down to put herself to bed in the truck. It was early, but she had half a buzz on already and tomorrow was bound to be a long day.

# * * *

It was _the_ Mrs. Kellar after all and it was everything Ana could do not to stare as she sat in the old bitch’s kitchen, pretending the ignorant piss pouring out of this guy Mason’s mouth was worth nodding along to. She hadn’t aged well, but she thought she was hiding it with extra layers of make-up and hair dye, and she didn’t appear to remember Ana at all, although that didn’t stop her from muttering about chippie tramps with tattoos whenever her housework rounds brought her through the room. This was especially funny to Ana, seeing as Mason had more ink than Rider, most of it the smudgy blue doodles that had been done in prison, and considering how much time he’d done, odds were good he’d been somebody’s chippie at some point. She did not make this observation out loud, however. She was a guest in this house.

Mason Kellar was Rider’s age, which put him about ten years older than Ana herself, and prison had weathered him out so that he almost could have passed for the old bitch’s husband rather than her son. He had a brother much younger than himself, perhaps even younger than Ana, named Jack. Looking back and forth between them was a lot like looking at a DARE poster meant to show you what ten years on meth did to a person. Because, holy shit, was she looking at a pair of meth-heads. That was the first strike against them; people who sampled their own wares to the extent that it showed on casual observation did not make for reliable associates in the drug trade.

The second strike against them was nothing so visible, just a gut instinct that these were bad people. And that was funny, because lord knew, Rider was as bad as they came and she had been doing his right-hand work for most of her adult life, but just knowing it was hypocritical didn’t make the feeling go away. She couldn’t pin down the reason for it either. Jack spent more time looking at her tits than her face, but that was nothing new, and Mason, apart from expressing his personal belief that the only tool a woman ought to be gripping was between a man’s legs, as per his constitutional right of free speech, utterly dismissed her gender from discussion and got down to business. His social skills were, as warned, rough and his conversation tended to be peppered with profanity and prejudice, but in that unconscious way that another man might pepper his words with “um” or “dude”. If one could look past all that, he was just another man whose ambition outpaced his intelligence and who made some bad choices chasing the dream of easy money. She ought to get along with a guy like him just fine, but still those fine hairs trembled and Ana wasn’t sure why. The best she could come up with was that it was partly in the easy, unconcerned way violence impressed itself on his words, and partly in that initial, almost obligatory leer, followed by his complete lack of regard for her body. She would almost prefer him to be obsessed with sex and violence than to be so…so unaffected by it.

But as unnerving as these impressions were, they were only itches and she couldn’t see herself calling the job off over them. No, the final straw was that Mason had, in the short time between last night, when Rider had apparently spoken with him, and this morning when Ana had arrived, already changed the plan. Not much—he had told Rider he had bought a house to flip, but told Ana they would be renovating this one—but it was enough to trigger that third set of alarms. This was not the arrangement she had been led to expect, which meant it was not the arrangement Rider was expecting, and if she had no other reason to cry the whole thing off, that was enough.

But she didn’t. In part because of the hundred thousand dollars sitting in the bank account waiting on Rider’s nod and in part because of that city-clock ticking away on her ninety days, but behind both of these things, like a shadow, were the spinning gears of some greater shape that must be Fate. The Universe, those same spinners and weavers and cutters that had pulled Ana out of Mammon only to send her back had plucked this man out of the same tapestry only to weave the two of them together now. She kind of wanted to see the picture they were meant to make. 

So Ana switched off these alarms, and even if she’d known how it would go from there—even if someone had shown her a magic window and herself on the other side, lying silent on the floor in the dark with her shirt soaked in blood—she would have done it all over again. It was a mistake. Just how much of a mistake she would not know for another two and a half months, but whatever didn’t kill you, right?

Ana nodded along until Mrs. Kellar had gone outside to weed her garden while her three yappy little Yorkshires scampered and shit their way across the lawn, then laid it out for them.

“Flipping a house into a house is not the same thing as flipping a house into a lab and then flipping a lab back into a house,” she said. “And running a lab out of your own house kind of defeats the purpose of doing a mobile cook. I’m not sure what it is you want here, but it isn’t what I do.”

The younger brother, Jack, started to say something big about how it wasn’t her job to think or something that had sounded much tougher on whatever TV show or movie he’d taken it from, but Mason gave him a, “Shut the fuck up,” in the same exasperated, impatient tone he’d used every other time Jack had opened his mouth. Then Mason leaned forward, arms loosely crossed in front of him but hands out and thumping slightly on the tabletop. Like everything else about him, his mannerisms and gestures were all emphatic, but not very visible. “Thing is this: These fucking guys I got coming in to do the shit work, I don’t fucking know them. Jackie-boy knows them. He says they’re good because they say they’re good, which is a lot like one shit praising another shit for being longer and browner and having more corn. It may be the best in the bowl, but a shit’s a shit, right, Jaquelina?”

Jack, flushing, managed to grin and nod along like it was a joke. 

“Now a house,” continued Mason, “that’s a big purchase. They don’t let you throw cash down and buy the fucking thing, you’ve got to have a paper trail or no fucking deal. And I’ve been in, right? You know that.”

“I was told.”

“Right, so you know the state fucking fucks me over every chance. They don’t rehabilitate me and they don’t want me rehabilitating my fucking self, you know? They fucking put me in there on fucking nothing, _nothing_ , and they want to keep me there for life. It’s all politics, you know, it’s all fucking lawyers and Jews. It’s about keeping the white man down so the fucking races can take over. Now, you don’t know this and that’s okay. You don’t need to. But that’s how it is. That is exactly how the fuck it is and they already got me. I’m got. Okay? So I can’t buy the fucking thing, I got no credit, no fucking FICO or nothing like that. My momma has to buy the fucking house and she wants to know she’s not going to get fucked on it by a bunch of dumb fucks who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, you know?”

“I see. So this is like a test?”

“That’s it. I’m not stupid. I’m not. You may think I’m stupid—no, it’s fine,” he said, as if she’d leapt up sputtering protests, which she had not. “Lots of people make that mistake, just because I’ve been in. Let me tell you, I got a better education in prison than you did in school, I guaran-fucking-tee. I learned how it is, how it really is. A lot of people think I’m stupid and that’s what I want them to think. They don’t want a man who thinks, you know? Who really thinks.” He tapped his forehead, then pointed at her. “You ever been in prison?”

“No.”

“You ever seen a man die?”

“Yes.”

“You ever kill a man?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s a good answer. Jackie, you hear that? That’s how you answer. I don’t know. He was breathing when I left him, that’s how you fucking say it. Breathing, but bleeding. That’s how you fucking _do_ it. I killed people,” he said without a pause or a change in expression, and those hairs at the back of Ana’s neck tingled again. “You look at my fucking record and you will never see that, but it’s true. I’m not telling you this to scare you, I’m just putting it out there. No secrets. You see this?” He pointed at the blue teardrops next to his right eye. “You know what this means?”

“Yes.”

“I went in on nothing. Fucking pigs fucking planted that shit on me. You believe that? I went in a boy, but I came out a man and the man I am don’t take shit from fucking no one. I am not stupid. You want to know is this a test? I want to know the same fucking thing. Rider sent you to see if I’m smart enough to join his little clubhouse, his fucking stables, right? So you tell him tonight everything I just fucking told you.”

Ana sat, picking through the heap of words and laying them out in straight lines, trying to determine just what it was he thought he’d told her. “All right,” she said at last. “But when it comes to what we’re doing here—”

“I can’t buy a fucking house, I told you,” he said with just a touch of impatience. “My mother, she’s got the fucking FICO and she knows all the fuck about those Jews and their banks. But she’s not going to buy a house unless she knows she’s not going to get fucked over by a bunch of big-talking little shits who don’t know how to fucking fix it up.”

“Or a chippie tramp with tattoos,” Ana agreed. “I understand. But I reiterate, flipping a house is not the same as flipping a lab.”

“You don’t need to iterate nothing at me, I knew that shit without you telling me. I am not stupid. Now, you may think I am, but I’m not. I don’t shit in my nest. You ever hear that one?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t shit in the nest. Those are serious words. You do not shit in the nest. So what I want you to do is, you flip the house into the lab so those boys can see how it’s done, but no one’s going to cook, right?”

‘Riiiight,’ thought Ana, but she managed not to say it like that. “Right.”

“Then you flip it into the house again and everyone’s happy. My boys know what they’re doing, Rider knows that I fucking know what I’m doing, and if I like what you do, who knows? Maybe I’ll use you on the next one too. Whatever. I don’t mind doing Rider’s pump a favor. Him and me, we are old, old friends. Maybe you didn’t know that, but yeah, him and me started a long, long time ago and him and me are going to be partners. Joint venture this bitch. That’s the whole fucking reason you’re here. I’m not stupid. I know Rider, I know the way he thinks. Him and me are like one brain. So when he sends you to me, I know why he does it. You think you’re spying on me. You aren’t spying nothing. I fucking knew as soon as you walked in. And that’s fine,” he assured her, showing her his hands. “You’re just following orders and I can appreciate that. You got nothing to fear from me. You just do your job and tell Rider I’m good and we got no problems.”

“So we renovate your mother’s house,” said Ana, guiding him back to the point, “and she buys the next one if she’s satisfied. Is that the arrangement?”

“You got it.”

“In the meantime, where is the funding coming from?”

Mason studied her, stone-faced, while his brother looked nervously around the room at nothing. “I just told you, no one’s cooking. How can I give you a cut of nothing? This is what you might call training purposes.”

“I understand that. Even if you were cooking, I am not involved with that end and I never take a cut from it. No, I’m talking about the construction materials.”

“Rider said you’d bring all that.”

“The fuck he did. Get him on the line,” ordered Ana, knowing full well that if he did, she would get her financing all right, but she’d also find Rider sitting on the porch when she woke up the next morning, wanting to know if his instructions were not clear. Later, perhaps over a pizza he would not eat and a bowl of weed he would not smoke, he would tell her some long, boring story about how horses who eat too much get too fat to run and a horse that can’t run might as well be dog food, or some other thinly-disguised warning not to get greedy.

Ana was not getting greedy. Whether the job took half the money in that bank account or all of it did not matter, since she knew Rider would take care of her if she ended up feeling she had earned more pay than she had received. This was less about the money she’d be getting than it was about letting Mason know he could not stick her with the check. Rider would understand that. If he were sitting here beside her, he’d be saying all this himself. He wasn’t, so it was up to Ana.

“He said you had your own tools and shit,” said Mason, expressionless and unblinking as a shark.

“I do. And I’m happy to bring the hammer, but I am not buying the nails, let alone the sheetrock, lumber and pipes, nor am I providing your boys with free access to my equipment. And let me tell you right now, if even one of my tools goes walking during the build, I’ll put your boy in the ground without a moment’s hesitation. If it happens again after that, I’ll put you in there with him.”

Jack laughed and started to say something, but he only got the, “Big fucking talk from a little girl,” part out before Mason again told him to shut the fuck up.

“Look,” said Mason after a moment. He paused, smiled, and started over, spreading his hands a bit in what was, for him, an expansive gesture. “I can’t be responsible for every pair of fucking hands I got under me. My guys, they got their own fucking lives. Some of them, they got their own fucking problems. I can tell them to leave your shit alone, but I can’t stand over them all fucking day, can I?”

“If you really know Rider as well as you say, then you know he’d be the first to tell you if one horse bucks, you blame the horse. If two of them buck, you blame the trainer. You,” said Ana, pointing at him with her eyes alone, “are responsible for your horses. If you’re telling me they won’t listen to you, they sure as hell won’t listen to me and I might as well leave right now.”

They stared at each other as his mother walked by the kitchen window in her sunhat and dark glasses, loudly muttering about whores who advertised their dirty dumplings with flashy clothes; Ana was again in a t-shirt and jeans. The t-shirt was stone-washed beige with a silkscreened velociraptor solving a Rubik’s cube and the words ‘Clever girl’ scrawled across the bottom. She ought to be ashamed of herself, wearing that slut-rag out in public.

“How much you need?” he asked at last.

Jack stepped away from the wall to thump his finger on the table next to Ana, saying, “And don’t you fucking think you can squeeze the stone, lady. Momma only gave us—”

“Shut the fuck up, Jackie. Sit your ass down. The big boys are talking.” Mason waited for his brother to obey, then said again, “How much?”

“It depends on what she wants. Usual cost for a place this size is thirty grand.”

Jack started to nod, but Mason said, “Fuck that.”

“There are permits you are going to have to buy, because no house sells without an inspection.” This fact served to remind her of her own problems, which put more of an edge on the rest of it when she said, “Your work crew is going to need a basic set of tools and equipment and I will tell you right now that if you go cheap on that shit, you will end up paying ten times as much down the line. When it comes to the job itself, I need to install a dedicated ventilation system and septic tank. That is non-negotiable. Then there’s walls, flooring, paint, energy efficient windows, and shelving. You don’t skip that stuff. That’s what turns into money on the flip, so I assume that’s what you want me to teach your boys to do.”

“I’m not giving you thirty thousand dollars, lady, so you can fuck right off if that’s your final offer.”

“Did I say that?” she asked, allowing the barest sliver of her deep frustration to shine through. “You asked what a job like this runs. I told you. I am also telling you that I will not foot the bill for this project, but I am willing to work within your budget. However, certain costs are just what they are and I am not going lower than twenty thousand.”

“Bullshit—” Jack began and Mason gave him a backhand without even looking.

“You can tell her some of it is tax deductible,” Ana continued, “and it’ll add an easy fifty to the value of the house if she ever decides to sell it. And if she were paying an outside crew, she couldn’t even get a full kitchen remodel for twenty grand, and that’s a fact.”

“She’s going to want a new kitchen,” said Mason, still staring her down.

“Then she’ll get one. I can build cabinets, install flooring, change out fixtures and redo the pipes and wiring if necessary. She wants an island, bay windows, pantry—whatever she wants, I can make it happen just for the cost of the materials, and you’ll have all the receipts to check my math.”

“And a laundry room. She wants a real laundry room, not just a stacked model in the fucking closet.”

“Lab converts to a laundry room just as easy as a workshop.”

“You do decks?”

“I do. Full, half, wraparound, split-level, covered, screened, hot-tubs, fire-pits, you name it. In fact, if you want to call her in, I will pull out my tablet and do a walkthrough to get the measurements. We’ll draw up a floorplan together, take some pictures, show her some styles. If you want to leave the finances between you and me, that’s fine, and I’m happy to nod along to whatever she says on that regard without questioning it. But I kind of feel like we ought to get one thing out of the way right now.”

“And what’s that?” he asked.

“If you don’t want to work with me, all you have to do is say so and Rider will have another guy out here tomorrow who, I might add, will quote you the same price, then jack it up by half and do a shit job. If, on the other hand, you choose to pull that whatever the fuck it is you’ve got your hand on in your pocket, you had better be a hell of a lot faster than I am.” Speaking calmly and moving smoothly, she brought out the crowbar she’d had tucked under her jean’s leg into her boot and which she’d eased out and into a comfortable grip across her lap shortly after sitting down at this table. “Because if I make it out of here alive, I’m calling Rider. And if I don’t, he’ll show up anyway.”

Jack had jumped back like she’d lobbed a live grenade on the table, but all Mason did was look at her. 

“Rider wants me to work with you,” Ana continued, holding his gaze as Mrs. Kellar watered her garden and yelled at her dogs. “If that’s good enough for you, then we’ll shake hands and get started. If it’s not, we’ll shake hands and I’ll walk away. But if you want to get into it over the cost of some cabinets and a bag of nails, then one of us is going to splatter some brains on that craptastic sunflower wallpaper in the next few seconds. It’s all the same to me, cowboy. Let’s go.”

After a moment, he said, “I’m going to take my hand out of my pocket now. You want to see what I got or you want it empty?”

“I don’t care one way or the other as long as you don’t point it at me. I’m not your fucking parole officer. I’m here to do a job. All I need to know from you is, are we doing this or not?”

Mason considered her and for as long as he did, Ana had no idea what he was thinking. It bothered her. A lot. But it was too late to do anything about it now.

“How many of these flip-things you done for Rider?” he asked.

“Around sixty or seventy. You’d have to call and ask him.”

“What’s the least amount of money back you ever made?”

“Me personally or the house in general?”

“The house.”

“Fifteen. It was the first one and a lot of mistakes were made. I learned from them. The last one Rider bought on foreclosure for sixty-eight, spent thirty and sold for one-eighty-seven.”

“And you did that?” He looked her over, neither impressed nor skeptical. “Shit, I might as well fucking forget the other shit and just do fucking houses.”

Ana waited.

Mason brought his hand up empty and held it out.

Keeping her grip on the crowbar, but not raising it, Ana offered her other hand. He shook that one instead.

“Jackie, go tell Momma to come in and say what she wants done to the house,” Mason said and got up from the table. “I’m gonna make some calls, get the boys over here so you can meet ‘em and find out how much they know about building and shit. You want some pizza or tacos or shit like that?”

“Whatever you want.”

“You need a place to crash while you’re in town?”

“I got a place.”

“You drink?”

“Not when I’m working,”

“Fuck?”

“Not when I’m working,” Ana said again, watching him help himself to a beer and snap the top off.

He nodded, drank, glanced disinterestedly at her tits, and said, “Well, I guess we’ll see what happens after the job is done,” and that was how Ana knew she’d gotten it. She smiled inwardly, thinking only of a hundred thousand dollars in a bank account that was soon to be hers and the roof it was going to fix. 

And she did a good job on it, too. It would rain that night, a rare summer storm, heavy enough to wash out the Old Quarry Road again, but in spite of the rain, the roof did not leak a drop. The puddle she would be laying in on that not-too-distant night would be cold and cooling blood.


	12. Chapter 12

# CHAPTER TWELVE

Word gets around in a small town and if Ana had any doubts about how fast or how far, they were dispelled the very next day when her phone rang as she was standing in the checkout lane at the Lowe’s lumberyard in Hurricane. Incoming call from Lee Shelton, her phone told her. After some small deliberation and with a due sense of smug satisfaction, she elected not to answer. He called again as she was paying and again as she was loading her supplies into the truck and one more time as she was driving before he seemed to give up, but the operative word there was ‘seemed’.

Later that afternoon, with the Kellar’s garage door torn off and loaded into the dump trailer (which Mason had no trouble at all renting), as Ana was busy framing in the new wall and considering staying a little late to run the wire and get an early start on the next day, she noticed a familiar truck cruise by…and then cruise by again…and finally cruise on up on the other side of the street and park.

Mason’s brother, Jack, who had been excusing himself for extended interludes all day and coming back increasingly fidgety and paranoid each time, immediately ducked into a corner of the garage. As conspicuous as if he’d snapped a spotlight on himself, he began frantically waving and hissing to get his brother’s attention.

“Would you cut that shit out? What?” Mason broke away from his court and came over, looking pissed off, and for good reason. His boys might be good at whatever the hell it was they did for him in every other respect—certainly, they were good at taking his orders and keeping out of his way—but the closest any of them came to experience in construction was the one who’d helped his father build a coop for the family chickens. All of them professed great skill and confidence around power tools and none of them could hammer in a straight nail. They had spent the morning taking the nails out of the lumber Ana wanted salvaged and hauling the rest of it to the trailer. After that, all they wanted to do was stand around and smoke while they watched Ana work. Mason had felt the need to defend them in the beginning, although Ana had not protested—it was less work to just do it herself than to keep slowing down to try to educate their miserable asses and then fix their fuckery—but as the hours wore on, the fact that they were doing less and less only became more and more apparent. There had been some shouting already and a little light slapping, although that had all been Mason beating on Jack, which seemed to be a natural condition for both of them and no cause for concern, but tensions were high and it wouldn’t take much of a spark to bring on the explosion.

Now Mason shouldered his way through the exposed frame and stood for a few seconds in the driveway, looking at the truck across the street. It was high afternoon and although it was not too warm, it was unseasonably muggy for spring, especially in the garage, and Mason had actually been working. With sweat putting the shine of definition on every muscle and acting as stark contrast for every smudgy dark tattoo, he looked very big, very mean, and very fresh-from-prison.

“Who is it?” Jack wanted to know, still trying to hide in the corner. “Is it cops? It’s cops, isn’t it? I told you this was a bad idea, man, I told you!”

“Shut the fuck up. Get out of there. Go inside.” 

“Do we go inside too?” one of the other boys asked. 

“You stay right the fuck where you are. Keep working on those fucking nails. She’s almost ready for the fucking wood here. Look at this shit,” he added with a derisive backwards glance at his suddenly hard-at-work boys. “She’s built a fucking wall, you ain’t even pulled nails. Fucking waste of dickmeat, all of you. Fuck.” Mason returned his stare to the truck. “You know this guy?”

“Yup.”

“Cop?”

“No.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Hell, no.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Probably trying to figure out what I’m doing here.”

Mason thought that over, then turned around, squeezed back into the garage and picked up a hammer.

“You can’t deal with it like that,” Ana said calmly, still working. 

Mason looked at the hammer, conflicted, but put it down. “Fine. You deal with it, then. And you make sure you deal with it so the lesson fucking sticks, you hear me? Because if I got to fucking deal with him again, I’m going to start by dealing with you.”

Ana finished setting her brace, double-checked to make sure everything was still level, then put her tools away, pushed her goggles up and pulled her mask down, and went out to see what old Shelly wanted.

He rolled his window down as she was crossing the street and hooked an arm over the door, his features drawing down in what he no doubt considered a ponderous frown of disapproval. Having gotten her share of those from Freddy, who was a hell of a lot better at them in spite of the handicap of an inflexible plastic face, Ana was not much affected.

“I’m working,” she said as he opened his mouth to begin whatever lecture he had queued up. “You do not come to my place of business and lurk in the fucking street when I’m working. I’m not your runaround wife. I’m not your underage daughter. I’m not even your employee, so we have nothing to say to one another.”

Shelly rather visibly checked his list of openers and decided against questioning her loyalties in favor of questioning her common sense. He pointed at Mason, who was back to standing shirtless and sweaty in the driveway. “You know who that is, little miss? You know where he’s been the last ten years?”

“Yeah, I do. I also know he is signing my paycheck for the next six weeks and furthermore, I know you’re not, so spare me the lecture and push on.”

Shelly thought that over and decided to be hurt. “Well, now, I know you were hoping for more hours, but I just don’t have them to give away at the moment. I got men with families to feed and what they need has got to come before what you want. If you’re hurting so much for pin money, I don’t see why you can’t nose around the community board, find out who needs a baby-sitter or a lawn mowed for the next few weeks. I told you, summer is my busiest time of year and I’m going to need—”

“What you’re going to need is another girl to make your coffee. I’m busy.” Ana turned around.

“What is it you’re doing here, anyway? Garage conversion?”

The best answer was a good old-fashioned none of your fucking business, but it was also the one with the most potential for raising suspicion, so Ana swallowed it and turned back. “Client wants a laundry room, bathroom and kitchen remodel, walk-in closet and shelving in the master bedroom and redesign on the master bath, all floors and interior paint.”

“How much of that are you doing?”

“All of it.”

He chuckled indulgently. “Not in six weeks, you’re not, little miss.”

Ana took a breath, let it out, walked back to the truck, got real close, and said, “Tell you what, Shelly, I may make a lousy cup of coffee, but Ana Stark does not half-ass a real job. In the past two years, I have never missed a deadline or come in over budget and I take it extremely fucking personally when some self-indulgent belt-hitching good-old-boy implies that _I_ do simply because _he_ does.”

“You got a real mouth on you, missy, and no one to mind it for you. I am the pre-eminent contractor in this entire town and have been the last twenty-two years. I know what six weeks of work looks like.”

“Yeah? You got a job going on right now?”

“As a matter of fact, I have three. I got new playground equipment to install this week at Primrose Park, I got a refacing job out at the fairgrounds, getting ready for the big Independence Day celebrations, and I got the old mall to tear down so I can start prepping for the build that you, little miss, are going to miss out on in August.”

“And yet you’re here,” said Ana, staring him down. “Throwing your dick around just because I got another job and you couldn’t think of anything better to do with your day other than waste your time and mine. And that’s why you need a week to install a goddamn swing set and a month to slap up some paint-by-number kiosks and _two_ months to clear and flatten a lot. Now tell me you’re on time and on budget.”

His mouth thinned. He pulled his arm back in and started rolling the window up. “Starting to think I dodged a real bullet with you, girl. If you’d grown up with a daddy, you might have learned by now not to lip off the way you do, but I guess for that to happen, you’d need a momma who knew who the daddy was.”

“Yeah, yeah, my mom’s a whore,” said Ana, already walking away. “Play it again, Sam, I love that song.”

“And you are going to end up just like her if you don’t start minding the company you keep!” he hollered and romped it out of there in a cloud of exhaust, red desert dust and righteous indignation.

Mason watched him go without moving, then shifted his eyes to her. “What was that about?”

“Apparently, my jeans are still too tight.”

He was neither amused nor distracted. “Who is he?”

“Contractor here in town, all butthurt over me not waiting by the phone for his handouts.”

“He coming back?”

“Better not.”

“Good. Because I do not need eyes on this fucking place. Fucking town. Everyone peeking in everyone’s fucking windows as it is.”

“We’re not doing anything illegal,” she reminded him. “We’re remodeling your mother’s house. We got our permits in order and everything paid for. Nobody’s shitting the nest, right?”

The sun caught his eyes just right as he watched her duck back through the wall into the garage, making them seem to glitter in the shadowed sockets of his expressionless face. He did not answer.

Ana got back to work and the siding was indeed up by the end of that day, but if the confrontation did not put her behind schedule, it did set the tone for the rest of the job, a job that, day by day, grew from a simple bad idea to the worst mistake she’d ever made. She could see it happening—hell, none of it came as a surprise—but even as her every instinct screamed at her to get out, she put her head down, kept her eyes on the hundred thousand dollar prize, and kept working.

She got the wall finished and the garage framed in by the weekend and spent the next two weeks trying to instruct her trainees in the fine art of how to build a meth lab, which was even more frustrating than anticipated. She had already begun to realize that Mason’s group was in fact divided between his boys—whose work detail consisted of testing the beer for poison and supervising Ana’s ass—and Jack’s boys—of whom Jack was easily the most self-controlled and competent. Ana’s work crew had been dipped from the lowest end of the latter pool, and while all of them were eager to prove themselves worthy of advancement in the king’s court, the best of them had the attention span of a greyhound and the rest of them had the attention spans of greyhounds on meth. 

At the end of that trying time, as per Mason’s not exactly shocking request, she did not proceed to turn the lab into a laundry room, but instead went to work on the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. The boys who were supposedly learning how to flip a house followed her around for a day or two, then drifted away into the old garage with the rest of Mason’s friends, leaving her to the company of Mrs. Kellar, who kept a running commentary on how inconvenienced she was by having her home ‘turned upside down’, forced to eat out on a widow’s pension and unable to cook proper meals for her two growing boys, let alone having to look at some two-bit hussy shaking her ass all around a decent woman’s kitchen like she thought it had a stripper’s pole sprouting up the middle. 

However, once the new kitchen came together, the old bitch wasted no time inviting a half-dozen of her friends over for a quilting party so she could show it all off. While Ana put the finishing trim up on the tiled backsplash behind the new stovetop, a steady stream of pinch-faced biddies looked dutifully on as Mrs. Kellar both exclaimed over the granite countertops and bemoaned the fuss of its care. The custom cabinets were praised, but every door and drawer was opened in a shrewish search for a crooked runner or creaking hinge. The grout on those floor tiles would stain, the touch-sensitive faucets were gimmicky, the new appliances looked too industrial and the installer dressed like a whore.

Ana couldn’t blame her that time. She’d gotten behind on the laundry and run out of Mormon-friendly t-shirts, showing up to work in one bedazzled with the sentiment _Lick Me_ , complete with moist lips sucking on a suggestive lollipop. Nevertheless, the next one was white text on black, saying simply, _You wouldn’t be such a big bitch if you’d just lose some weight._ Mrs. Kellar was not amused, but the comments stopped, at least within her hearing.

With the kitchen finished, Ana would have liked to move upstairs and start the bedroom, but she was forced to strip wallpaper throughout the downstairs rooms and paint instead. This was by no means the ideal time, but by then, the chemical smells coming out of the garage were getting stronger, so Ana had to cover for it. 

Ana kept the peace as long as she could, but after dragging out the simple job over three days, she caught one of his boys by the arm and told him the carpet she’d ordered for the master bedroom had been back-ordered and she needed approval on a new style. Once she succeeded in breaking through the boy’s blank stare, she only had to wait a minute before Mason was stomping upstairs and slamming the bedroom door open. 

“I don’t fucking care!” he greeted her. “Do whatever! Just do it without me needing to stop what I’m doing to hold your fucking dick for you!”

“Shut the door.”

He stared at her. Even without the sun shining on him, his eyes got that hooded, shark-like glint. After a moment, he stepped clear of the door and shut it. 

“You are shitting the nest,” she told him.

“I ain’t doing any such goddamn thing—”

“You are shitting the nest,” she said again, enunciating clearly.

“Bitch, you don’t come into my house and call me a fucking liar.”

“You’re a fucking liar and you are shitting this fucking nest.” 

He started for her. 

She met him halfway across the floor, taking long, swift steps, but keeping her voice low as she said, “It’s your nest and you can shit all over it all you fucking want, as long as you understand that your birdie ass will be back in prison by the end of the fucking day if you cannot figure out how this fucking thing works! Turn the fucking vent on! Keep the fucking lab door closed! And do not allow your fucking pony-boys to show up for work dressed for the cover of Thug Life Monthly!”

They stared at each other, silent, motionless.

“Rider let you talk to him like that?” he asked finally.

“I don’t fucking have to,” she snapped. “He’s a goddamn professional. I don’t know what the fuck you are, but this nest is well-shat and it is time to wipe your fucking ass and flush before someone other than me smells it!”

He nodded with his chin, never blinking. “Should be out of there in a few days.”

‘You shouldn’t be in there at all, you dumbass,’ thought Ana, but she didn’t say it and she thought she kept it out of her eyes pretty well. “Good. I appreciate it. Is there anything you need to say to me?”

She waited for him to hit her. He thought about it and he didn’t care if it was in his eyes or not, but in the end, he shrugged a no at her.

And that was that for another two days. Ana was allowed to work unimpeded by the presence of Mason’s trainees, right up until Hardwood Floor Day, whereupon Mrs. Kellar swept herself and her yappy Yorkies out the front door, declaring that the noise from the sander and the fumes from the wood stain were giving her a headache and probably giving her precious babies cancer. It was unclear whether she meant the dogs or her sons, but what was clear was that Ana had only just finished sanding down the new living room floor and hadn’t even prepped it, much less started staining. However, once she got her breather off, the chemical smell hit her like a brick to the sinuses.

In spite of everything at stake, the very least of which might be her own safety, Ana lost her temper.

Out through the kitchen she went and into the new hallway she’d installed in the old garage to find the goddamn door open. Without a word, she stalked over and slammed it as hard as she fucking well could. In the unfinished space, still concrete floors and bare walls, it made just a hell of a noise. She wasn’t even back to the kitchen before the door opened again and out came an angry man who, in all fairness, it had not been a good idea to startle.

Words were said. Never in her entire time in Rider’s stable had Ana ever gotten in a shouting match with another pony, but she didn’t have a chance to be embarrassed by her behavior, because either the slamming door or the yelling had brought Mason in from the backyard where he and his favored few had been smoking and making business calls. She did manage not to join in with the finger-pointing, just stood and fumed until Mason turned his shark eyes on her, when she said, “The door was wide open and your mother noticed the smell. If that had been someone else, someone who knew what they were smelling, the fucking cops would be on their way right now.”

Mason nodded once and turned back to his cook. “You leave the door open?”

“It gets hot in there!”

“Did I tell you to keep the door shut?”

“It was open for, like, two minutes and she comes barging her fat ass in—”

Before Ana could cut in—and she would have, something she never would have done in Rider’s stable—Mason punched his cook in the face. The sound was as loud in its own way as the slamming door had been. There was blood on his knuckles when he pulled back his arm, blood squirting through the other man’s fingers as he clapped them over his mouth with a caw of surprise and pain.

Ana’s breath caught and her feet rooted. She watched, frozen, as Mason knotted a hand in his cook’s shirt and commenced to beating on him until there were teeth on the floor and blood on the walls. It took a very long time. The noise in the unfinished space was tremendous.

When he was done, he shook the man off the end of his arm and stepped back, a little sweaty, but not angry out where it could show. He looked at Ana. All his other boys had removed themselves; they were alone in the hall. The sound of the man on the floor struggling to breathe was thick and wet; Mason’s breaths, by comparison, were somewhat labored, but steady; Ana’s could not be heard at all.

She waited.

At last, he looked at the walls—misted, speckled and splattered with blood. He frowned. “Can you clean this shit up before Momma gets back?”

She looked at it, too, fighting her throat to open up and let the air in. When she thought she could speak, she said, “I can wipe it down, but it’s going to leave a mark. Better to wipe it dry and cover it with a coat of primer. I still have half a gallon left upstairs. That should be enough to start. You’ll need to get more.” 

“You better do that,” said Mason with a scowl. “You send one of these dumbasses to the fucking hardware store and they’ll come back with the wrong shit and one of those fucking yard gnomes besides. What else?”

She breathed a little more. “I’m not sure how long we can count on your mother being out of the house and I need to get some stain on the floor before she gets back so she has something tangible to blame for her headache.”

“Good thinking,” said Mason. “Go get the shit and come back quick. Someone will do the painting while you do the floor.” He turned around and yelled, “Jackie! Get in here!”

Jack appeared in the doorway of what was someday to be Mrs. Kellar’s Mormon-sized pantry. “Yeah?”

“You and Riley are on clean-up.”

“Use dry towels, not wet ones,” said Ana. “If it’s wet, the primer won’t stick.”

“What she said. Don’t use Momma’s good towels or I’ll kick the shit out of you. Fry.”

Another man moved into view.

Mason pointed at the laundry room. “Finish that shit up. Turn on the vent. Shut the door.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Mason eyed the moaning man on the floor, then glanced at Ana. “You got any duct tape?”

“In my tool chest, second drawer on the left,” she told him and went to the hardware store.

When she got back, the only ones left at the house were Jack, his fidgety friend, Riley, and Mason’s boy, Fry. The hallway off the kitchen had been wiped down, for as much as mere wiping could do, but she put the three of them to work with paintbrushes and a bucket of Kilz and it was just was white as a bridal gown by the time Mason and the rest of his boys returned, minus one. They were all sunburned, their clothes dusted with that reddish color that came straight from the desert. The wet stink of the quarry came with them, set in their sweat and their skin.

He stood in the kitchen doorway for a time, watching her work or maybe just watching her. She did not look up to see which. Eventually, he went away. Still, Ana kept her head down and her hands busy. She still needed to get two coats of the deep honeygold stain Mrs. Kellar had selected on the floor today. Tomorrow, wax and buff at least three times. If Mason was ready for her in the laundry room, she’d get started in there on Friday. If not, she’d do the pantry first and move on to the laundry room when she got the nod. That would take a week, more if his boys ‘helped’, which they were almost certain to do after today. Say another ten days for the master suite, and a few more days for the three Ps, and she could get the fuck out of here, under budget and ahead of the bullet.

These were Ana’s thoughts as she worked that night, unaware that on the other side of the wall, Mason and his boys were quietly discussing just what to do with her. Long after Ana had finished the floor and gone home, the debate continued, although the tone had already begun to shift toward what to tell Rider when she went missing. At length, one of the young men who was supposed to be her apprentice was dispatched to assess the risks and potential rewards of further action. His mission being one of stealth and his sister having dibs on the family car, he took his bike, a decision he would come to bitterly, if briefly, regret as he pedaled up and up and up the hairpin curves of Coldslip Mountain. It was well past midnight when he walked his bike down the long driveway to the only house on Old Quarry Road, where everyone in that small town knew Melanie Stark’s prodigal bastard had moved herself in, and right past the truck where Ana slept the sleep of the stoned. After placing his getaway vehicle in the best position for a speedy escape and making a cursory trip around the mansion to note doors, he located a broken basement window and crawled inside.

The single scream Ana later heard translated itself in her dreams to Freddy’s static-filled roar as he lunged at her and she moaned, but did not wake up. In the morning, when she found his bicycle lying in the grass behind the house, she assumed it was part of the hoard and wheeled it over to the garage to put it with all the others. Then she went to work.


	13. Chapter 13

# CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Kellar job went much more smoothly after that, in part because no one ever forgot to close the door again, in further part because Jack’s friends rediscovered whatever lost motivation they’d had for embarking on a career in home renovations and became moderately helpful, and in final part because Ana made the conscious decision to get the fuck clear of Mason even if it meant sleeping with him. It did not, which was more unnerving than the alternative, because he was far from oblivious to her presence and if his constant staring and shadowing didn’t have anything to do with sex, then it had to do with his missing cook, whose disappearance appeared to have gone unnoticed in this tiny town where everyone noticed everything. But then, Mammon had a long history of not noticing when people went missing. 

It was a bad situation, made tolerable because she could tell herself she could get out of it anytime she wanted with one phone call. And it might have been true, at least in the beginning, but that ended the day she came home and found two official papers stapled to her aunt’s front door. The first was her written notice informing her that a representative of the city’s health and welfare department would be by on this day between those hours to determine whether the property was safe to inhabit. The second was a citation, because evidence of habitation was already present—meaning her clothesline and camp stove, no doubt—and she had fourteen days to pay the attached fine. A handwritten note at the bottom of this paper added that if she persisted in taking up “unlawful residence” in her own damn house, she could be arrested for trespassing. 

Tempting as it was to call these assholes up and demand to know how the hell she was expected to clean and repair the property without setting foot on it, Ana restrained herself. She already knew the answer anyway. They didn’t expect her to fix the house; they expected to tear it down. 

Hopeless as the situation seemed, Ana was determined not to give them the satisfaction of an easy victory. After each full day working on Mrs. Kellar’s house, no matter how late or how exhausted she was, she went to work on her own. With a little chemical augmentation, she made steady progress in both places, but had to use more to maintain her momentum, resigning herself to the mounting paranoia and insomnia as acceptable risks. 

But with each passing day, the lines of her perceived reality blurred out further beyond their former clear boundaries. She heard things—every whisper of wind across the grass outside the truck where she lay awake sounded like footsteps. She saw things—dreaming or awake, those lines were blurring, too. She began to feel, as the debt guy whose name she could no longer remember had told her, not alone in the house where she had always felt welcome and safe. She grew more and more disconnected from herself and the consequences of her actions, even as other obscure connections crept in from the borderlands and insisted upon themselves: The dump trailer in Mrs. Kellar’s driveway seemed to be stuck at half-full, no matter how much broken sheetrock or old sinks she threw in it, while the dump trailer in her own driveway was always either empty or full and she couldn’t keep the damn cover from blowing off it to save her life. This was important, somehow. This was absolutely life and death shit. Within the invisible threads binding those two dump trailers to each other and to her were found the secrets of the universe. How could anyone be expected to sleep with mysteries of that magnitude unveiling themselves right before her eyes?

A part of her was dimly aware that this was a bad situation and she was making it worse, but it was a quiet voice and easily silenced. 

Until she moved the grandfather clock.

She moved the clock because it was Sunday and, as Mrs. Kellar informed her, only heathens and whores worked on the Sabbath. Mason and his boys were out at Jewel Lake; he had invited her along, but the idea of being trapped out where no one could hear her scream with a couple dozen of the kind of guys Mason Kellar rolled around with held far less appeal than that of working in a house that was likely to be knocked down in another week or two. She’d bought a power washer for the Kellar job and although some small part of her still pleaded with her not to use it indoors, today it seemed like the best way to get this floor cleaned. She could start from the kitchen, down the hall and straight out the front door, no problem. She just had to clear everything out of the way so nothing would be damaged by the force of the spray. Safety first, as Chica would say.

The clock was massive, half again as tall as Ana if not taller and broad as a coffin. She found it just where it had always been—in the hall off the front foyer, next to the rolltop desk where Aunt Easter used to keep the mail and other grown-up papers. Unlike the desk, which had collapsed under the weight of the hoard, the clock had come through with minor damage, just a crack across its glass face and a few scratches she thought she could patch. The little bronze key was still hanging from its hook inside the door and it started right up after it was wound. 

“Tick tock, tick tock,” murmured Ana, but that was all she knew of the song that had been someone’s father’s favorite. She couldn’t even scratch up a melody to hum. Oh well.

Finding the clock intact was the first pleasant surprise she’d had in weeks and she stood in front of it too long, just admiring it (and weaving on her feet; her admiring pause may have been in part provoked by the double-dose of Ritalin and triple-dose of Lexotan swimming through her system, let alone the oxytocin. She’d told herself quite sternly it was too much, but after six 12-hour days in a row, she needed _something_ to get anything done here at the house). 

The clock was worth an hour’s perusal, easy. She had no idea where her aunt had picked it up. It had always been here, as much a fixture of the house as the gothic front doors or the lead-lined patterns in the attic windows. Several folk-tales had been carved into its sides by an artist who’d never heard of Disney, every child-endangering detail lovingly rendered in wood, from the terror in Little Red’s eyes as the big teeth her Grandma never had yawned wide to the leer of anticipation on the witch’s face as she pinched caged Hansel’s plump cheek and chained Gretel looked helplessly on from where she stood sweeping. Crowning the whole nightmarish collective, a ghastly interpretation of what might be Beauty and the Beast had the place of honor over the clock’s face, although Beauty did not seem to be entirely willing as she swooned over the monstrous Beast’s arm and behind her, carved crows tore at the face and breasts of her unfortunate sisters and dogs snapped at the feet of her rose-stealing father. 

Funny, to think that she could remember this clock, remember that it had been carved all over, even remember that those carvings had something to do with fairy tales, and yet forget the exact nature of those carvings so completely. Objectively speaking, this thing was fucking terrifying.

And yet, Ana smiled as she stood before it, her eyes tracing each gruesome vignette with nostalgia, remembering this clock only as something that had towered, steadfast, throughout her uncertain childhood. With this memory came fragments of others—of hiding inside back before the clock had been fixed, and again, even less distinctly, of the man who had done the fixing. Scratch of beard stubble. Glint on glasses. A smiling man. _This was my father’s favorite song…_

Did it play a song? She moved the hands ahead to force the clock to strike the hour, but heard only the Westminster chimes rising and falling before the little hammer inside came down six times. That wasn’t what anyone would call a song.

And it didn’t matter. She had procrastinated long enough. The rolltop desk had already been scraped together, its papers dumped in a box to be sorted later and its wooden pieces removed to the dump trailer. The many, many, many components of the hoard had likewise been hauled off, either to the basement for sorting or the yard preparatory to dumping. She had saved the clock for last, but there were only so many hours in the day and so much gas in the generator. Time to get to work.

Ana took a knee and set her shoulder against the clock, heaving it with a grunt of effort just enough off the floor to slip a caster under both corners. She set it down again and moved to the other side, rubbing her strained muscles. Damn thing weighed a ton. 

But it was a ton that glided easily on casters across a marble floor, so after she got all four of them positioned just right, Ana put one hand over the lunatic laughing face of the farmer’s wife as she raised her carving knife high over three unsuspecting mice (Millie, Tillie and Hillie, thought Ana. Visit Gallup Gulch!) and the other on a sobbing mermaid who was melting away to foam on the shore as another man and woman kissed further up the beach, and pulled the clock away from the wall. So far so good. She angled it for an easy glide into the kitchen, then moved around to the side, put one hand on the etched glass door and the other—

The other flailed right through the nothing where the back ought to be and smacked the heavy brass pendulum. Somewhere inside the clock, a jostled hammer struck a single dour reverberant tone.

Ana stupidly leaned out and looked, just to make sure she hadn’t suddenly acquired the power to phase through solid Romanian pine or whatever the fuck this was, but no. From just below the head of the clock to the framed footboard at the bottom, there was no panel and no damage to the frame to show where it had been knocked out.

Well, so what of it? It was a family heirloom and full of memories going back God knew how long. Who cared if it was broken? The clock part still worked and who even looked at the back of a clock? It blended in so perfectly with the wooden wall-panels…

The rest of that thought faded, first to static and then to silence as Ana, looking now at the wall where the clock had stood sentinel all these years, saw that the clock had been positioned precisely against one panel, filling it, blocking it…and there was a good inch of empty space between the bottom of that panel and the floor.

“Okay,” said Ana after a moment. “So someone fucked up their measurements and cut it the wrong size. Those panels are probably imported or something. Can’t order just one and they’ve got to be expensive as hell. Just throw a clock up against it, who’s going to know?”

She was not convinced.

“You can still do this,” Ana warned herself. “You can still move this clock and clean the floor like nothing else matters. You could be done by noon if you really bust a hump. You could have the clock back in place tonight, smoke six joints and forget you ever saw that fucking gap. You can fix up the house. You can sell it. You can get in that truck and drive as far as that money will take you and live the rest of your life in blissful ignorance of whatever is behind that wall, because it is not going to be a treasure chest full of fucking pirate gold and Hershey kisses.”

Ana stepped away from the clock. She watched her hand reach out and touch the cool, smooth surface of the panel. She felt the slight give and heard the soft tap as the hidden wheels on this hidden pocket door moved on their runner. Her heart pounding and mouth full of pennies, Ana slid the panel aside and opened a small room, scarcely big enough for the ornate iron stair spiraling away into the dark.

Secret room. Secret stair. Secret place somewhere in some secret second basement sharing a wall with the one she’d always known wasn’t big enough.

But not Aunt Easter, her skin dried and wrinkled as parchment, stretched and sunken over her bones. Not David, arms curled around his drawn-up knees, skull still grinning over a game of hide and seek he had been winning for twenty years. Not here, anyway.

Had this always been here? She couldn’t imagine it hadn’t, any more than she could imagine it had. Worse, fragments of that awful dream she’d had her first night in town—the clock turning into a nail-studded coffin, and herself walking into it, walking deep—made her think she’d known about it on some lost level. Had she bumped the hidden door open hiding in the clock while David hunted for her? Had she gone alone into the dark or had he been with her? What had they found at the bottom of that secret stair that made Aunt Easter fix the clock so that they would never climb inside it again…but not seal up the door?

Ana walked away on rubbery legs all the way out the front door to the porch where she was keeping her tools these days, out of the weather and in some kind of order. She picked up and set down her prybar, machete and heavy wrench before settling on a hammer with a sturdy haft, solid weight and claw tip. She found a flashlight in the bag with the junk leftover from the rebuild on Bonnie’s face and went back inside.

The iron stairwell was little more than a central pole with ornate slats spinning out around it in steep spirals, claustrophobic despite its open lacework design. She went as quietly as she could, but although the stairwell didn’t wobble in the slightest, each step creaked and sighed under her weight. She might as well be wearing a damn bell. She had never felt so conspicuous or so vulnerable, unable to see past the fanning steps below or get any hint of the space beyond. Her ankles itched, anticipating the clawed hand or killer’s blade sliding between the risers even after she’d reached the bottom. 

The walls in this second, small room, the twin of the one above her, had been painted black, adding to a darkness that already had a closed-in, suffocating squeeze to it. There was nothing here, however, apart from the thick carpet of dust on the cement floor…dust that was thinner between the bottom step of the stairwell and a most particular panel on the wall.

Ana slid the hidden pocket door there open and stood for some time just staring at the room beyond, knowing it was horror she was feeling, but unable to pinpoint its exact source or feel out its full dimensions.

There were no windows and that was the first awful thing, somehow. Even if it was in the basement, there should be windows. The house might be older than the fire code, of course, but this room had lights and ventilation and plenty of electrical outlets, so at some point, fire codes should have been a factor. But there were no windows and no way for the outsider to ever guess this room existed.

The walls were paneled, not in wood, but either steel or enamel, painted royal purple. The floor was tiled, but buried in layers of area rugs. The lights were recessed and caged. Every effort had been made to soften and brighten the space, but it remained cold and sterile beneath its new colors.

There was a bed, a big one, an adult size that had been nonetheless made in the shape of half a pirate ship. Its sides and footboard bowed out to form a curved prow with a saucy, split-tailed mermaid for a figurehead. A mast fixed to the wall supported rigging and sails that could double as a canopy for the very grown little matey who slept here, if indeed anyone had ever slept here. It was neatly made, the corners tucked and sheets turned down. The topmost blanket was deep purple with gold stars and crescent moons, nearly the same colors and pattern as the curtains that hung in Pirate Cove. Lying facedown on the pillow—

But no. It wasn’t David’s Fredbear at all, although it seemed to be made of the same yellow satiny fabric. This wasn’t even a bear, but a bunny. A big stupid-looking yellow bunny in a purple bowtie, grinning vapidly into space with all its blunt, worn-down teeth showing. Ana found a wind-up key hidden in the butt just like on Freddy-bear and wound it up. With a wheeze of very old gears, the bunny’s mouth made laughing/chewing/screaming motions before grinding to a halt, jaws agape. When she prodded at the mouth, it found the strength to snap shut, catching her finger between its painted metal teeth with surprising force. She pulled free and put it down, resisting the urge to wipe her finger off like its bite came with some infectious disease. 

To one side of the bed was a rolling table with collapsible trays and drawers, of the sort found in hospitals. On the table were several pill bottles. Ana glanced around the empty room one more time, then put her hammer down and picked up the bottles, one by one. Pain killers, migraine medication, mood stabilizers and sleeping pills, most of them from a shady online pharmacy and all expired. She put them down again and moved on. 

On the other side of the bed were several square cabinets set at an odd height halfway up the wall between two doors. The cabinet doors were thick and utilitarian beneath their coat of cheery purple paint; the latches were clunky steel. Opening them revealed deep, lightless spaces, each one occupied by a single long tray that could be pulled all the way out, like the drawers in a morgue. Arranged on each tray, neatly folded, were clothes. Shirts and sweaters in the first, pants and jeans in the second, socks, underwear and pajamas in the third. They were all in men’s sizes, but a boy’s style, all superhero insignias and bold colors, down to the size 32 underoos. 

Behind the door on the left, she found an insulated recess more like a walk-in freezer than a closet. There was an IV pole and a folding wheelchair tucked in among the wire racks of linens and cleaning supplies. The other door opened on a small bathroom. The cabinet under the sink held several cases of sterile gauze, boxes of baby wipes and half a bag of adult-sized diapers in addition to the standard rolls of toilet paper. A single towel still hung on the bar with one other folded and put away. The toothbrush had Spiderman on it. The toothpaste was Spider-mint. There were handrails on the walls and non-skid decals in the bottom of the tub.

On the opposite end of this spacious room was an oversized bean-bag chair aimed at a man-sized flat-screen TV from a time before flat-screens had become quite so flat or quite so common. Ana counted eight different consoles neatly cubbied, each in its own nesting place below the television, cords wrapped up and controllers to the side. A wall of games going all the way back to Atari cartridges occupied the built-in shelves that dominated the far wall, organized according to platform and then by name. Easily a hundred VHS tapes filled the remainder of the shelves, mostly cartoons, with a handful of DVDs almost like an afterthought at the end of them. A last bookshelf held a few comic books and coloring books, but mostly action figures. Toyboxes shaped like treasure chests held Playmobile pirate or castle sets and other boyish dollhouses, along with some plushies, notably that of the classic Circle Drive Fazbear Band.

Between the ‘bedroom’ and the ‘living room’ was a ‘kitchen’: a small counter space with an even smaller set of three square cupboards above it, a sink, a microwave and a full-size refrigerator. In the cupboard were two or three mismatched sets of child’s character dishes. The soap dispenser had a frog on it. Stuck to the front of the refrigerator with Fazbear Band magnets was a color-coded chart laying out the rules for a balanced diet in ways even a child could understand, the same system that had let Ana and David know what to fix themselves for dinners or snacks if Aunt Easter had to leave them alone for a few hours. At the bottom of this page was a short step-by-step list for cleaning up after each meal, all written in Aunt Easter’s handwriting. The refrigerator itself was empty, a bit sour from being closed up all this time, but spotless.

The little wall-space available had been taken up by posters depicting characters from movies or comics, all but one cluster of printed coloring-pages from Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria saying things like _My Favorite Day at Freddy’s was_ or _My Best Friend is_ with plenty of white space below for budding artists to show their stuff. This budding artist’s work was largely made up of indecipherable scribbles and stickmen, but one of them stood out from the rest.

In it, great sweeps of purple crayon and yellow sunbeams formed a recognizable setting, that of Pirate Cove, as it had been in Circle Drive, just to one side of the show stage. Three black squiggles with legs and arms suggested the Fazbear Band performing to a crowd of circular heads, but the focus of the piece was Pirate Cove, where a monstrous beast with huge black sockets for eyes had lunged out and sunk its many jagged teeth in the frowny-faced head of a stickman in a purple shirt or dress. Red crayon poured down this unhappy victim’s body and all over the floor and walls and even the table where another stickman sat spooning pink blobs into its mouth. The poster’s nudge toward inspiration read _The Best Birthday Party Has_ and ungainly letters answered _Cake! Yum!_

Just below this poster, in a place of honor atop a high barstool like a holy relic upon a pedestal, was a plastic cupcake.

It was bigger than a real cupcake, but smaller than a real cake, wider at the top than at the bottom. The sides were rippled, mimicking cupcake paper, but the ‘frosting’ looked more like a scoop of strawberry ice cream that had partially melted, making a high, smooth dome with scalloped edges drooping over the lower half of the cupcake. A fake candle jutted from the exact center; the bulb had broken, but looked as if it might just be a standard Christmas light.

Thinking it looked familiar to her although uncertain how, Ana picked the cupcake up to get a closer look and was surprised by its weight. When she tipped it to one side, she heard the unmistakable sound of a loose pin or screw tip-tip-tapping off other objects and rattling away against the underside of the frosting. There was no obvious on/off button or wind-up key on the bottom of the thing, so she turned the cupcake around in further search of one and almost dropped it.

It had eyes. No, worse than that. It had sockets, deeply sunken and painted black, and set within those burned-out holes were glass eyes, horribly human-like, fitted with top and bottom eyelids so the fucking cupcake could blink if it wanted to.

Ana held it, not because she wanted to touch it anymore, but because she did not trust it, silently daring it to blink. After a moment, she realized just how ( _high_ ) stupid that was and gave the thing a second cautious shake. Whatever was broken inside it rattled around some more, but it also let go a few tinkling notes. A music box? But no wind-up key. However, there were screws on the underside of the frosting cap, so maybe she could fix it. Maybe. For now, she put it back on the shelf and then, just as whoever had lived here had done before her, turned it to face the wall.

Whoever had lived here…

“No one lived here,” said Ana. Her voice cracked. “Come on. Seriously. No one lived here. She…She went a little crazy after David disappeared. She made this place as a kind of…a kind of shadow box. She preserved him here, that’s all. No one wore those clothes. No one slept in that bed, except maybe her. None of this was his. She took it all from that mountain of crap she’s been collecting all these years and she made him a playroom.” Her hand rose and pressed, shaking against her lips as sour waters stung her dry mouth. “She made him a playroom,” she insisted. “She didn’t…She didn’t keep him here. She didn’t…” Her eyes darted to the pirate ship bed, the open bathroom door with the half-bag of diapers in the cabinet, the posters on the wall. 

The biting thing in Pirate Cove. Red crayon.

“You’re being paranoid,” she said. “You’re high and you’re paranoid. That’s not even David’s handwriting.”

God, the teeth on that thing. Its head was drawn bigger than the entire rest of its body. A bite to the head from something like—

— _foxy_ —

—that and brain damage was practically a given. A person would have been lucky even to remember how to write. 

“David went to live with his father,” said Ana.

Had she ever really believed that?

And what did she believe now? That, after giving Ana the coin and telling her to run to his house when Foxy came for it, swearing that he’d be there to protect her, David had gone back to Freddy’s? It had already been getting late that day at the quarry. It would have been dark by the time he got back to town. Freddy’s would have been closed. So now he wasn’t just going back, he was stealing his mom’s keys to break in. To do what? What could have possibly been worth the risk? Never mind the whole get-caught-and-go-to-jail or mom-gets-fired aspects, those were grown-up threats. Eleven-year-old David had risked everything to steal a piece of the captain’s cursed treasure; he never would have gone back, knowing Foxy would know he’d done it.

But he’d loved Foxy. Loved him. It couldn’t have been easy to steal from him. Had he felt guilty? Enough to go back, to try and explain? No, not a chance. David could be a bit sensitive, but he wasn’t stupid. Captain Fox had no remorse for thieves and it didn’t matter who they were. If David had dared to show his face after stealing one of the gold doubloons, he’d have…

…he’d have…

Split him lights to liver and sent his bones to Davy Jones.

Ana’s first step didn’t want to hold her. She caught herself on the bookshelf, took deep breaths until she could feel her feet again, then grabbed the poster and tore it from its tacks.

The world tipped and spun. Her boots rang on the iron stairs, oddly muffled while her breaths were harsh and sharp in her ears. She was on the stairs and then she was in the hall and then on the porch and then in the truck. She did not drive but was driven, past hairpin curves and sheer drops to that long stretch of Old Quarry that led to Edge of Nowhere and Freddy’s. 

She skidded to a stop before the front doors only to find the fucking bear had locked the barricade down again. She kicked it and before she could stop herself, kicked it three times more, a crash of metal and panic that rolled out over the empty desert for anyone to hear. She succeeded in loosening it just enough to let her squeeze under with the poster rolled up in one fist, trying not to crush it because wrinkling it would mean she’d been scared and she wasn’t scared because that room was nothing, no one had ever been held there, David had not been held there, and Aunt Easter had gone crazy but everything else was fine.

She snagged her hair and ripped her shirt, but she got through and scrambled to her feet on the other side, suddenly face to face with David once again.

He grinned at her, only her, from the other side of his paper Freddy-mask. Just another kid in another photograph, one of hundreds papering this wall. Through the broken gift shop window, she could hear the animatronics doing one of their shows, Bonnie and Chica singing _This Old Man_ , counting all the ways there were to play knick-knack, just as they had for almost fifty years, and illogically, the thought came to her that they were all missing, like him. Every happy child on that wall, taken; every smiling face in every photo, a skull; everything she’d ever heard about this place, true. Freddy and Foxy and Chica…and Bonnie…they killed kids. Killed them and ate them and the only reason they didn’t come after Ana was because she was already supposed to be dead. Or already was and just didn’t know it.

The sallow light within the foyer increased minutely. Freddy had come to the glass partition separating the West Hall from the foyer and was peering in at her, for all the good it must do him through that nasty window. Ana watched him dully for a moment, then boosted herself through the gift shop window. She sat on the counter for a few seconds, picking glass out of her palms, then climbed laboriously down and made her way out through the cluttered gift shop. Bonnie and Chica were still singing, although Bonnie had started stuttering and falling further and further out of sync.

Freddy didn’t try to grab at her when she came through the door into the West Hall with him, although he did turn his head all the way around to watch her go. Beyond that, she was not aware of him.

She went to Pirate Cove. 

Foxy was telling jokes either without set-up or without punchlines on the other side of his curtain, and so Ana climbed down the steep amphitheater steps and sat down to wait.

“…WELL, ME MAGICIAN FRIEND MANAGES TO CATCH HOLD OF A PIECE OF TIMBER BIG ENOUGH TO ACT AS A SORT OF RAFT AND AS HE’S FLOATING THERE, STARING IN DISBELIEF AT HIS MISFORTUNE, WHO SHOULD FLAP UP BUT THE PARROT? THE ACCURSED THING LIGHTS ON THE TIMBER, PREENS HIS FEATHERS A BIT AND FINALLY SAYS, ‘I GIVE UP, MATE. WHAT’D YE DO WITH THE BLOODY BOAT?’” 

A pause for applause. The silence was clarifying. What in the hell was she doing here? What was she going to say to him? What did she think he was going to say to her? What could he tell her that would make anything—anything!—make any more or less sense? David had never even been here! He’d never seen this version of Foxy.

Behind the curtain, Foxy was just beginning the short monologue that ended his act. She listened, but now heard mostly old gears and wheezing pneumatics. An animatronic. Not a monster. Just a machine.

David was dead. Aunt Easter had gone crazy. And Ana was no longer sure she wasn’t doing the same thing. What the hell else did you call it when you broke into an abandoned pizza parlor to ask the goddamn animatronics to explain a picture on the wall of your crazy aunt’s crazypants playroom? Hell, that thing could have come from anywhere. She could have lifted it at any time over the thirty years she’d worked in the Fazbear chain or even drawn it herself as part of some weird way of keeping her vanished son alive and with her in the safe place she’d made for him. There could be a dozen different answers and all of them just as real and right as the rest, but one thing was for damn sure—Foxy the Pirate didn’t know.

Ana got up, reaching for her eyes to wipe them dry before remembering she might still have glass in her hands. She’d just have to let her stupid self leak. Serve her right.

“…FAIR WINDS AND A FOLLOWING SEA,” Foxy was calling as she squeezed out through the broken boards. She made one halfhearted effort to do something about covering the hole, then just leaned it up against the door and left. “AND TO ALL ME LITTLE HEARTIES, SAIL ON.”

# * * *

There was silence then in Pirate Cove, enough to let the sound of her truck’s engine carry through the broken door. The ratty purple curtains shifted, then drew aside. Two eyes, one yellow and one white, lit up and scanned the empty auditorium. 

“Oi, Ana!” Foxy called, his ears pricking up to catch any stray sound that might answer him, even though he knew she was gone. Sure enough, he heard only Freddy’s footsteps heading his way from the West Hall, but he saw something new on the bench nearest the stage. 

A coloring page, he guessed and he wasn’t wrong. It had been rolled up and crushed some in the middle by an incautious fist, and it was a damned odd thing for the girl to leave for him like a flower pressed betwixt the pages of her hope-book.

Foxy jumped down from the stage and picked it up, using his hook to unscroll the sheet and have a good look at it.

He saw only scribbles at first.

Then he saw the picture they made. 

“Oh hell,” he said numbly.

Freddy had reached the Cove and before he could ask anything, Foxy turned the page around and held it higher.

Freddy’s eyes lit, flickering until the first tinkling notes of the Toreador March played out, then steadied. The light of his eyes hit the paper, showing Foxy a shine-through image of the picture on the front, red and black and purple crayon recreating the events of November 13th, 1987. 

He hadn’t seen it personally, but he’d heard plenty and it would have looked just like this. When the screaming started, that-Chica and that-Freddy had started laughing, but that-Bonnie had just switched songs, from the Fazbear Birthday Song to the Yum-Yum Song, which made the others laugh so much harder. So Foxy knew it had been bad, but even he hadn’t known how bad, not until they’d brought Mangle back to the Parts room, now trying to sing too, blood on her mouth and her chest and bleeding out her full black eyes. 

Foxanne. He had to remind himself her name was Foxanne. She hadn’t started out mangled.

Except she sort of had. She’d started out broken, anyway. Damaged in mind, if not in body, like all of them that were made in _his_ image. And he’d known, oh aye, he’d known something would happen sooner or later, but no one had been expecting this.

“IS. THAT.” Freddy stopped there, clicking, unable to find the right words.

“Aye, ‘tis the B-B-Bite o’ ’87,” snapped Foxy. He tried to roll the paper up again, but it couldn’t be managed with a hook or maybe just with his mood. He smashed it into a ball instead and threw it. “How’d she g-g-get it, that’s what-t-t I want to know! How’d-d-d she get it or how’d she see it? Why’d she g-g-give it to me? Who _is_ she, Freddy?”

“I DON’T KNOW.” Freddy descended the steep stairs and bent with difficulty to retrieve and smooth out the page. The Toreador March started up again, shut itself off, started, stopped. “SHE. DIDN’T. STAY. SHE. DIDN’T. TALK. TO. ME. OR. BONNIE,” he added. “SHE. CAME. SHE. LEFT.”

Foxy believed him, but still had to see for himself. Taking the steep amphitheater steps two and three at a time, he ascended to the upper level and went to the mouth of the West Hall, which was as far as he could go during operating hours. He was rewarded for his efforts with the sight of the damned cat and the door, all broken on this side and boarded up on the other. No sign of the girl or her truck. Hell, hadn’t he heard it driving off? He listened all the same and heard Chica singing down in the dining room.

Just Chica.

Hadn’t stayed, Freddy had said. Came and left and didn’t even stop to talk.

“Bonnie all right?” Foxy asked after a moment.

Freddy was still looking at the poster and did not look up to answer, “NO.”

Foxy listened some more, then went across to the East Hall door and opened it, leaning out to listen in that direction as well. He still heard only Chica. “Where is he?”

“KITCHEN,” said Freddy. He clicked a few times, then said, “HE. WENT. BLACK.” 

“So ye locked-d-d him in the freezer?” Foxy barked a laugh in spite of himself. “Ye’ve g-g-gone cold in yer old age, mate.”

Freddy did not dignify that with a response. Squinting at the bottom corner of the poster, he said, “THIS. IS. NEW.”

“Eh? Can’t-t-t be. Tis the Bite, I tell ye.” Foxy came back, hopping the high rails and landing on all fours—all threes?—next to Freddy. He straightened, stepped down from the now-cracked benchtop and took the poster to look for himself. “Aye, that-t-t be Mangle. Could-d-d be no other. That’s the bloody p-p-parrot there on her sh-shoulder. Has to b-be from Mulholland.”

Freddy pointed at the corner of the poster.

The design of the various posters handed out at the pizzeria had not changed since the doors were opened at the very first Freddy’s, back on High Street, so that was no kind of clue, but there was a coupon on the bottom corner that could be cut out and exchanged for ten dollars off the reservation cost of the party room for those parents heartless enough to chop up their child’s precious artwork. Above that coupon was an address and a phone number. Seeing it, Foxy’s ears went straight up.

“This b-b-be from this site,” he said in amazement.

Freddy nodded.

“But this ain’t-t-t just any coloring page, it be a b-b-birthday page!” Foxy flipped the poster over and back again, seeing no names, no dates, no clues of any kind. “Were there any birthday p-p-p—PIRATE COVE—parties that-t-t week?”

Freddy shook his head.

“I didn’t think so. There weren’t-t-t time enough between the opening fuss and the c-cl-closing. But…then where the bleeding heck-k-k did this _come_ from? What did-d-d she…” Again, Foxy flipped it over. Its backing remained unchanged from seven seconds earlier. “Did she find-d-d it here and color it in her d-d-damn self? Blindfolded,” he added with a critical looking-over of the scribbles on the front face. “Or high. Or both.”

Freddy grunted. “SHE. WAS. HI!”

“Ye think? Really?” Foxy asked, startled. “It ain’t even noon yet-t-t.”

Freddy thought that over and allowed himself a profoundly unconvinced shrug. “MAYBE. NOT. BUT. SOMETHING. WAS. WRONG.”

“Hell, I never seen her but-t-t that something were wrong with her,” Foxy replied uncharitably. Scowling one last time at the poster, front and back, he returned it to Freddy. “Where d-d-did she get it now, seriously? Where’d th-they keep the p-p-p—PARROT WALKS INTO A BAR—posters anyway? There any ch-chance at all she j-j-just happened on a stack of ‘em last time she were here?”

Freddy shook his head. “EVERY. ROOM. HAS. BEEN. PICKLE. OVER.”

“Pickle, eh?”

Freddy’s face showed the slightest hint of annoyance. “YOU. KNOW. WHAT. I. MEAN.”

“Aye, so, g-g-getting back to the question, if she only c-c-could have got it here, and it were never p-p-passed out here and she d-d-didn’t peel it off’n a wall or find-d-d it in a closet…what’s that-t-t leave?”

“ANY. ONE. COULD. HAVE. TAKEN. IT. AT. ANY. TIME.” Freddy studied the poster, his cameras focusing alternately on the picture and the paper itself as he considered. “AND. THEN. SHE. FOUND. IT.”

“Found it where? Ye j-j-just told me—”

“HOME.” 

“Eh? Just lying around-d-d like?”

“THINGS. GET. LEFT,” Freddy reminded him with a pointed glance and a gesture that included the entire restaurant and themselves in it. 

Foxy thought that over. “Aye, I reckon it-t-t could be. She lived-d-d here when she were a young’un. I think she’s moved-d-d into her mate’s old house. The one she said-d-d I done in,” he added. “David.”

Freddy looked sharply up at him.

“Aye, gave me a t-t-turn, too,” said Foxy. “Don’t know why. Common enough name, ain’t it?”

Freddy grunted and looked back at the poster as if seeing it with new eyes. He touched it, tracing an invisible line beneath the two oversized words scrawled there. “NOT. HIS.” He clicked, frustrated, and shook his head, now miming writing with his fingertip.

“I know. It weren’t-t-t that David. Her David-d-d weren’t even done in after all, just g-g—GONE TO DAVY JONES—gone away with his d-d-dad. She said so once she so-o-obered up.” He was coming to the end of his mingling time and he had to be back in his cabin before the start of the next set, but still he lingered, wanting this settled. “But that st-still ain’t no kind-d-d of answer. If her D-David left when she were a mite, he c-c-couldn’t have taken this p-p-poster.”

“SOME. ONE. ELSE. THEN.”

“Someone else living in her b-b-bleeding house?”

“WHY. NOT.” Freddy emphasized his unconcern with the implausibility of this scenario with a shrug. “PEOPLE. MOVE. AND. EVERY. ONE. COMES. TO. FREDDY’S.”

“Not everyone saw the B-Bite. Not everyone c-c-could have waited twenty bloody years for the chance to st-steal a b-b-birthday poster from the Grand Opening here, d-d-draw it out and then leave it somewhere for another ten years for the g-g-girl to find. Ye don’t really th-think that were an accident, do ye? And she knew what-t-t she were looking at,” Foxy insisted. “She b-brought it right to me! So I says again, what-t-t the hell for?”

Freddy didn’t offer any suggestions. He didn’t click through possibilities either. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself. At last, he carefully folded the poster into a small, neat square and opened his abdominal casing, tucking the paper up into his chest cavity for safe-keeping. “YOU. WOULD. HAVE. TO. ASK. HER.”

“Ye think-k-k I’ll g-g-get the chance?”

“I. DIDN’T. THINK. I’D. SEE. HER. TODAY. SO. WHAT. DO. I. KNOW.” Freddy slapped his stomach shut and pointed at the stage. “THE SHOW’S ABOUT TO START.”

Foxy descended the amphitheater, but stopped before he reached the stage and looked back. “How long d-d-do ye mean to let her come and g-g-go?”

Freddy growled, heading for the door. “DON’T. TELL. ME. I. SHOULDN’T. I. ALREADY. KNOW.”

“And I know why ye d-d-don’t. Bonnie and all his bleeding heartsick nonsense.” Foxy rolled his eyes and shook his head, before once more growing serious. “But she be a loose c-c-cannon if ever th—THAR SHE BLOWS—there was. She can only c-c-come tripping in and out so many t-t-times before she tumbles onto something she-e- _eeeeee_ —shut it, ye blasted thing—she shouldn’t.”

“I KNOW.”

“Ye know, but yer not-t-t stopping it. I know Bonnie’s sweet-t-t on her and, damn me fer a sea sponge, but I like her meself. She’s f-f—FAIR WINDS AND A—fair company when she ain’t-t-t three sails out…and hell, even when she is,” he admitted, thinking of that night and the easy way she’d talked with him between deep drags from her ‘tobacco-free’ cigarette. “But it j-j-just be a matter o’ time, don’t it? Before she lets someone in…” He glanced around as Mangle pulled herself out of one of the crawlways and dropped noisily into her nest backstage. “…or lets someone out. And if yer okay with the risk-k-k, then I reckon I am too—”

“I’M NOT,” said Freddy, scowling at the stairs as he climbed them. “BUT. SHE. HAS. NOT. DONE. ANYTHING. WRONG.”

“Oh for…Ye c-c-can’t really think everyone we ever done for here d-d-deserved it, can ye?”

Freddy did not answer. He climbed one more stair and then just stopped, halfway up.

“Painting a few d-d-dirty pictures and throwing k-k-kit around…even bashing in Bonnie’s head…that ain’t-t-t a death sentence, Fred. Now I c-c-can stomach what we do in p-p-part because most of ‘em makes it d-d-damned easy to want ‘em dead, but in b-b-better part because there b-b-be a bigger picture here, or at least, I thought-t-t there were. And if it j-j-justifies killing all o’ them—” Foxy flung out his arm to indicate the entire amphitheater as if they were all there, row upon row of empty seats that could have been filled and overfilled with those Foxy alone had done in since the Grand Opening ceremonies had ended and the doors had closed. “—then it has t-t-to be worth killing her. If it ain’t-t-t…what are we really doing? If we ain’t protecting sommat, we’ve just been murd-d-dering fer the pure grin o’ it.”

Freddy’s head turned, not enough to show him his eyes, but only the rounded curve of his cheek. “THERE. HAS. TO. BE. A. LINE,” he said. “THERE. HAS. TO. BE. ONE. THING. LEFT. TOO. WRONG. EVEN. FOR. US.”

“If ever there were, I c-cr-crossed it long ago, mate,” Foxy said as his internal clock lit up, telling him he had less than five minutes until he had to be in his cabin to start the show. “All th-th-them years singing for him, hunting for him, k-k-killing for him…aye, and fucking for him. Ye c-c-can draw the line around her all ye want, but I don’t see the p-p-point o’ pretending I got even a slip of soul left-t-t to save. All I g-g-got left is him and keeping him where he is so’s I c-c-can rot in peace.”

“IS. THAT. WHAT. THIS. IS.” Freddy’s head turned a little further, still not looking at him. “IS. THAT. WHAT. WE. HAVE.”

“We c-c-could, if ever we were left alone.”

“ARE. YOU. ASKING. ME. TO. K-K-KILL. HER.”

He was. Of course he was. He knew it and so did Freddy, but when it came to saying so out loud, Foxy just couldn’t. Even the thought put a sick, squirmy feeling in his guts. He had not felt ashamed in a long time. It took a minute to recognize it.

“Would ye if I d-d-did?” he asked finally, which was not an answer and they both knew it.

Freddy faced forward again. The light from his eyes flickered and went out, but he was still there, a dark shape in a greater darkness.

Foxy waited, aware of each second that slipped away. Soon, he’d hit the one-minute warning and his programming would move him into his cabin, and never mind his feelings on the matter. Not so Freddy. Freddy could stand there all day if he wanted to, although Foxy knew better than to think he’d wait him out just to win an argument. He was thinking, that was all, and the longer he took to do it, the more Foxy wanted to hear whatever he had to say.

“SHE. TRUSTS. ME,” said Freddy at last, lurching into motion but still never looking back, “I. LIKE. THAT. I’VE. MISSED. THAT.”

Foxy opened his mouth to argue, then shook his head and closed it. He climbed onto the stage and hooked the curtain, drawing it aside.

“SHE. THINKS. SHE. IS. SAFE. HERE. WITH. US. WITH. BONNIE. WITH. ME.” Freddy reached the top of the stairs and kept going. “SHE. ISN’T.”

Foxy looked back. Freddy did not. 

“SHE. WILL. NEVER. BE. SAFE. WITH. ME,” said Freddy, heading into the East Hall. “I. HAVE. KEPT. HIM. LONG. ENOUGH. TO. BE. COME. HIM. WE. ALL. HAVE.” He grunted, holding the door for a moment as he thought. “JUST. IMAGINE. HOW. FUNNY. HE. WOULD. FIND. THAT. IF. HE. KNEW.”

The door punctuated his final words with a rusty groan and a dead click. Alone in Pirate Cove, Foxy went to his cabin and waited out the last minute before the start of the show. The girl’s lantern was there, resting on the curved top of the treasure chest. He turned it on. He didn’t need the light, but live in the dark long enough, as he’d told the girl, and it starts to live in you.


	14. Chapter 14

# CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Ana never did get the foyer and hall of her aunt’s house power washed, which was less a case of her coming to her senses and more about getting too high to operate machinery. In spite of what evidence suggested had been several attempts to get the power washer running, she had forgotten the essential role of the gas generator and had plugged the thing into the wall outlet instead. She could remember none of the frustrations this must have caused, but she guessed they had been fairly impressive because although she found the cord still plugged into the wall, the brand-spanking-new power washer was out in the front yard, where she appeared to have beaten it to death against a catalpa tree. 

Ana probably could have fixed it, but not with the head she had on this morning, so she just gathered it, its cord, its box and packing materials, its operating instruction booklet and its fucking 30-day warranty, and threw it all into the dump trailer. Breakfast was Ritalin and Redline and then it was off to the Kellar job, where she worked herself to exhaustion, came home to a dinner of oxytocin and pot, and mopped the foyer—with plain old soap and water—before moving the grandfather clock back against the hidden door to the secret stair. Maybe in time, she’d be able to convince herself she’d never found it, but until then, she had work to do.

The days blurred together, pink and blue, sun and moon. She thought she put herself to bed each night in the truck, but woke every morning in the house—in the attic, in the bathtub, and once, terrifyingly, sweating beneath the purple comforter in the secret room below the clock. She would buy food, take a few bites and leave the rest in the most random places; she washed her clothes and either let them hang on the line until the wind blew them into the yard or folded them neatly and put them away in one of the house’s bedroom closets for her future self to find and be whipped into a paranoid panic by. She began to work later and later hours, preferring even Mason’s company and the muttering of his mother to that of her own ghost.

It couldn’t last.

One hot afternoon, having just completed the finicky process of staining the brand-new deck’s rails and posts, but before the job of staining the boards themselves had begun, Ana’s energy bar went from glowing green to flashing red between two beats of her suddenly laboring heart. She did not speak. She rose from her knees on the deck where she had been just starting her first brush strokes and, as her vision washed out to swirling white, staggered blindly to the stairs and fell into the grass. 

She waited on her hands and knees for things to get better or worse while Mason and his boys sat in the shade at one end of the yard and watched her. 

Several units of time passed, but whether they were seconds or minutes or even hours were impossible to know. The sun was blinding, hateful. The sky was blue, not warm and summery, but pale, as if the unseasonable heat had sapped all the color and life out of it. The ground on which Ana sat had baked hard and cracked wide open beneath the grass Mrs. Kellar had somehow coaxed to grow. Even the shade in which Mason’s many, many boys sat looked thin and painted on.

Ana threw up. She hadn’t eaten in a while, maybe not for days, so it was nothing but coffee and a few white dots that were undigested Ritalin and caffeine pills. With shaking arms, she scratched up some loose soil from the flowerbed and buried it, then crawled a short distance away and sat, leaning up against the side of the house. She shivered now and then, hot and cold and sweaty and possibly dying.

She waited. 

Jack said something across the yard and his cronies started to laugh, but Mason shut them all up with his usual charm and got up. He went into the house and came out an unspecific time later with a six-pack of chilled beer and a cold can of Pepsi, which he dropped in the grass in front of Ana. He went back to the shade and passed beers out to those he deemed worthy of receiving them. 

Ana watched beads of moisture trickle down the sides of the can until she was certain it existed. She reached for and eventually caught it. It was cold in her hand, reminding her she was hot. She lifted it—it seemed to weigh a ton, but she knew that was exaggeration; it couldn’t have weighed more than ten pounds—and placed it to the side of her neck, against the thick vein there. She felt the relief at once as the blood pumping too fast through her body passed beneath its cooling pressure. 

“You dying?” Mason called.

She shook her head carefully. “Overheated,” she said and maybe she was even right. It was hot. The heat had rolled in right on the heels of an equally unseasonable cold snap, but she was finding its effects harder to shake off. Hard work could keep a girl warm even if her breath was showing; in this weather, even sleep felt exhausting and she wasn’t getting enough of that, either.

“Take a break,” Mason ordered, like she needed to be told, like she wasn’t already sitting there, like she’d never had heatstroke in her life and didn’t know what to do about it. 

Ana sat, holding the soda to her neck, cooling her temper along with her blood. Her thoughts first settled, then sank, then rose up again with the heartening observation that the deck was the last major project and when it was over, there was nothing left but the clean-up. Once she was out from under this job—and Mason—she could focus her waning energies on her aunt’s house, where it was needed.

She tried to agree with herself, but couldn’t. Heat and hopelessness beat down on her. What did she have now, a week? Less? She’d lost track of the days, but she knew there weren’t enough of them left before the inspection was due. She had a pretty good idea of what an inspector would be looking for and if it were any other house, or maybe just any other town, she could probably pass just by showing that the hoard was gone (almost; the basement was still pretty full, although she had made a path from the stairs to the fuse box and the water main at least), but it was _this_ house, in _this_ town. 

The unfairness of it stung at her. She’d started out with plenty of time and money, but not the right papers. Then she’d had the papers and the time, but not the money. Now she had the money, but nowhere near enough time to fix everything she knew they’d want to use an excuse for condemning the house. She thought about it, but her thoughts had a way of swirling around the drain without ever unclogging the pipe, and in the end, she decided to let someone else do the thinking.

When she stood up, the low talk at the other end of the yard went quiet, so she knew they were watching her. She did not—could not—look around to make sure. The whole world throbbed in time with the blood pounding in her ears. She could not feel the ground beneath her feet or her legs as they moved her forward or hear the rasp of her hand on the siding of the house as she felt her way along. 

Once around the corner, into the shade and out of Mason’s sight, she sagged against the wall to rest. It was cooler here and Mrs. Kellar’s herb garden grew along the tall fence, softening the harsh air with its good green scent. Also, an open can of Pepsi had materialized in her hand. Soda was the second worst thing a girl on the edge of heatstroke could be drinking, next to beer, but it was cool and sweet and wet, so she drank it anyway.

A few swallows gave her the strength and energy she needed to walk more or less unsupported all the way to the gate separating the back yard from the front, although the simple lift-latch there gave her too much trouble to convince her she was fully recovered. 

Mrs. Kellar was on the other side of the driveway, watering her roses in the middle of the afternoon when it could do the very least amount of good, and she did not say one word until Ana had her damned hand on the door of her truck. Then she said, “Don’t you leave my gate open. You go back and close it this instant.”

Ana looked down at the three Yorkies panting in the shade cast by her truck, then out at the street, with nothing but a hot sidewalk to separate them, then back at the open gate, which threatened to…what? Let the dogs into the fenced and protected back yard?

“Go on,” Mrs. Kellar said, in the same tone she used to use to urge her students up to that imposing blackboard with the algebra problems waiting to humiliate them.

Ana went back and closed the gate. Then she returned to her truck and once more reached to open it.

“Don’t you have something to say to me?” Mrs. Kellar asked.

Ana peered at her over the hood of her truck. “What the hell do you expect me to say? Thank you for letting me touch your gate? Get the fuck over yourself.”

The old bitch sniffed at her and resumed wasting water on her roses. “If I were your mother, you wouldn’t be using that kind of language.”

“If I were your kid, I’d have killed myself years ago.” Ana yanked the truck open and pulled her day pack across the seats to fish out her phone. And an aspirin, a real one, because her head was splitting wide open and letting all the butterflies out. Also the Ritalin, because she’d puked up the last one. The bottle was empty—God, the day she was having—so she found the one with the blueberry sticker on the cap and opened it instead. Blueberries meant blue pills and blue pills were Adderall. Addy had a way of turning Ana into just a ridiculous perfectionist, which meant if she wasn’t careful, she’d spend the rest of the day trying to paint stain along each individual streak of grain in the wooden boards of the deck, but she had no choice. She was so fucking tired. She needed it. 

She washed the pills down with Pepsi—where had the Pepsi come from?—and headed for the back yard again, leaving Mrs. Kellar to mutter at, and about, her ass.

Once more the talk stopped when Ana came into view, but she pretended not to notice. She found a patch of grass with thin stripes of shade cast through the porch railings to sit in and turned on her phone. Mason’s eye was on her at once, glittering in that dark way as she found Rider’s safe number in her contacts list and sent the call through. He couldn’t have heard anything…not until he got up, as he did, and came over to listen in.

“The stain’s still wet,” she said before he could lean up against the rails and Rider, who had chosen that instant to pick up on his end, replied, “Everything takes longer to dry in the rain.”

The non-sequitur caught her off-guard. Ana looked up at the burning white eye of the sun and said, “What?”

“But it’s always good weather for fish.”

Ana blinked, thought, blinked again and cautiously said, “The fuck, Rider? Are you high?”

“Naw, I’m talking spy-speak. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, good thing you told me. I think I was about to order a hit on the pool boy. What stain?”

“Deck stain.”

“Still working for Mace?”

“Yeah.”

“He there?”

“Yeah.”

“Put him on the line.”

Ana looked at Mason. After a moment, she held out her phone.

He took it, listened, grunted, and walked away to a quieter corner of the yard to talk. Ana sat, feeling sweat like claws scratching over her skin. Whenever she noticed she had a drink, she drank it. Every swallow was the first. She waited, thinking no thoughts and feeling no feelings, only sometimes connected to her body.

Eventually, Mason returned, passed over her phone and once again began to lean toward the rails of the deck.

“Stain,” said Ana and pretended not to see Mason yank his own arm out from under himself, nearly losing his balance and pitching himself into his mother’s azaleas.

“Did it again, huh?” Rider laughed and his Zippo went off. “Dumbass. He leaving?”

“Yeah,” said Ana, watching Mason walk away and rejoin his boys.

“You calling about him?”

“No. I need a guy.”

“All right, but I got shit to do in the morning, so we got to get right to it and no cuddling afterwards.”

“I don’t cuddle, Rider, and that’s not what I meant. I think I need a lawyer.”

The distinct sound of Rider taking his boots off the table came over the phone. “Explain.”

She tried, but her words tended to follow her thoughts, which were tangled up and often rooted to each other rather than to the issue at hand or herself. 

Rider listened to her ramble on for a while, then cut her off, saying, “I’ll take care of it, darlin’. When is the inspection, do you know yet?”

“Yeah, it’s…” When? She knew once. She would have sworn she knew right at the start of this phone call, but it was gone now. She closed her eyes, trying to scratch it up from her hair, but all she could see in that inner darkness was the papers as she’d first found them, stapled to the door. “It’s written down,” she said finally. “I don’t…know…”

“Okay, well you just find me that date and call me back as soon as you can. You doing all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said mechanically.

“You eating?”

“What?” She pulled the phone away to look at it, as if clues to the question were to be found on its little screen, then put it back to her ear. “Of course I eat. Why?”

“You sound thinner.”

“You make a lousy Italian grandmother, Rider,” she told him and hung up.

Mason decided the azaleas needed closer examination and wandered back over to her end of the yard. “What was that about?” he muttered, looking straight at the flowers and scarcely moving his lips at all.

“Just checking in. He worries.”

“About what?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“About me?”

“If Rider didn’t have every confidence in you, I wouldn’t be here,” said Ana, because sometimes the truth was called for and sometimes it wasn’t.

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“You still got every confidence in me?”

Ana drank her soda, mulling over possible responses, from _As much as I ever had_ to _I’m just here for the money_ , and settled on, “Sure.” Succinct, non-threatening and least likely to get her dumped in the quarry alongside his ex-cook. And maybe others. It seemed to Ana she was one guy short after that day, the day the hallway off the kitchen got primed, but she did not ask questions and, after all this time (and all her vitamins), she was no longer sure. Besides, people disappeared in Mammon all the time. It didn’t mean anything. Not like those dump trailers. That shit was ponderous.

Sunk in these thoughts and sinking deeper with every elastic second that wrapped itself around her, Ana did not notice Mason moving toward her until his knee brushed her shoulder, which was funny because she had been looking right at him without being in the least aware that his approach led to a decrease in the distance between them. She only knew that he abruptly appeared beside her and that was unacceptable and so, armed with nothing but a half-gone can of Pepsi and a heat-headache, she said, “Step the fuck back.”

Mason fingered an azalea leaf before plucking it and letting it fall. It stuck in her hair. Stuff was always getting stuck in her hair. Wood shavings. Plaster dust. Paint. And that troubled her, because shit like that did not happen by accident. 

“Or?” he said, knowing just as well as she what that leaf in her hair meant.

“Or bring it to me,” she said and looked at him, him and all his boys together, knowing damn well how that would end but pleasantly severed from any sense of concern. It was her leaf now.

But Mason didn’t rise to the challenge. He didn’t even look at her. He just said, “Is that what he did?”

In spite of her best efforts, she was afraid her cool exterior may have cracked a bit under the confusion. Rather than try and sweep it back under the rug, she went ahead and let it show. “Who?”

He glanced at her. His eye glittered.

She waited.

His own cool exterior cracked, but she couldn’t read what lay beneath, except that it was not a good look on a man looking at her. She thought again what a stupid mistake this whole thing had been, and looked away to finish drinking her Pepsi. Warm already. It was so hot out here and it was still only May. She still had the whole summer to look forward to. Utah summer. _Mammon_ summer. This heat-wave, so unnatural now, would be par for the course in another month or two. It’d hit triple digits before Independence Day, she thought dourly, and then dump eight inches of rain in one night, hit triple digits again, and finish out with an early frost at the start of September as a preview of the winter in store for her.

The leaf, forgotten, came loose from her hair and fell into her lap. She picked it up and put it back, securing it between the knots of her braid so it would be sure to stay. Her head did not hurt anymore, but still wanted to. Her vision did not swim, but moved in place, treading the water of her perceptions. Too many pills, she told herself again, but the only thing she could think to do about it was take another pink one and calm herself down. 

“You done here?” Mason asked suddenly, startling her from her open-eyed heat-thick drowse.

She looked at him, trying to figure out where he’d come from and how long he’d been standing there, even as she knew—absolutely and unequivocally knew—she’d been talking to him just a few minutes or hours ago. The conflict grew internally larger, threatening to split her in two—one Ana to be her own self and the other just to watch—and she wasn’t sure in which half she’d end up.

“I think you’re done here,” Mason said, looking over the deck.

Reminded of the deck’s existence, and by extension, the job, Ana looked at it too. The rails and posts were done and she supposed she must have done them, because there was stain on her shirt, jeans and hands, but the boards themselves were naked. “It’s not finished,” she said.

“Yeah, but we can handle it. Been watching you all day, haven’t we? Anything else need to be done to it after it gets painted?”

“Stained,” she said, looking back at the deck in alarm. “It’s supposed to be stained, not painted.” Because holy shit, had she been _painting_ the fucking thing all morning? But no. No, it was wood stain. She was fine.

“What the fuck ever,” Mason was saying with a hint of the same exasperation in his tone he used so often on his brother. “Same fucking difference. Is there anything else you’re supposed to do to the fucking thing, that’s the fucking question. Does it need all that other shit like you had to do inside?”

Inside? Ana looked up at the sun, then at Mason. “You mean, like, waxing and buffing?”

“Yeah, that other shit you did in the living room.”

“No,” she said, baffled. “No, that’s a deck. You use the all-in-one stain and sealer and that’s it. I mean, you let it sit after that. At least a day, two is better, but you don’t have to—”

“So you’re done.”

With effort, she clapped the two straining halves of her separating selves together and made them think in tandem. What came after the deck? “Just the clean-up,” she said.

“My boys can do that shit. You’re done.”

He kept saying that word. And it didn’t just have to mean the job was finished, did it?

Ana drank off the second half of her hot soda and heaved herself upright so she was, if not eye to eye with Mason, at least not huddled at his feet. “Have we got a problem?” she asked. “Your mother not happy with the remodel? Your boys unclear on the process?”

“We’re good,” he told her, his eyes never blinking, never leaving hers. “Momma sure loves that kitchen. She’s brought half the fucking town over to look at everything and brag about how fast you threw it together.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“No problem. You’re done, that’s all.” He shrugged, but still did not blink. Fucking shark on two feet. For a second, she could see the gills. “What am I supposed to do, tell Rider his girl got fucking heatstroke on my shift while my boys sat on their fucking asses and watched? Fuck that. They haven’t done shit except hold the fucking grass down this whole time. Let ‘em finish.” He turned his head, but not his eyes. “Jackie! Get over here!”

Jack scrambled to his feet, dribbling beer down his chin as he took the bottle away too fast, and jogged over. “Yeah?”

“Finish that.”

Jack looked at the deck like it was a dragon, then at his brother, open-mouthed. “What? Huh? How? I can’t—”

Laughing, Mason slung an arm around his little brother’s shoulders and ground his knobby knuckles against Jack’s scalp. It sounded like it hurt. “Sure, you can,” he said, smiling at Ana as his sinewy muscles bulged with the force of the noogie he was delivering. “Sure, you can, Jackie-girl. Nothing to it. You pick up the brush. You put stuff on the brush. You rub the brush on the wood. What’s so hard about that, huh? Can you do that for me, Jacquelina? Huh? Can you?”

“Yes! Yes, God, stop! Stop it, Mason!”

Mason did stop, but gave him a slap to each flushed cheek before shoving him back. “Then get going. You want another one of those for the road?” he asked Ana, nodding toward her hand.

Without thinking, she looked down and discovered a Pepsi can at the end of her arm. Where the hell had that come from? It was empty. Had she been drinking it? Had she been drinking the fucking thing all this time without—

Never mind that, had it been open? Had he put something in her fucking soda?

Of course he had, she realized, staring at him. No wonder she was so confused and sweaty. He’d drugged her.

But he didn’t know that she knew, so maybe there was still a chance of getting away. 

“I’m good,” she said and pretended to drink some more to prove it. “So I guess I’ll get going, then. Don’t forget you have to call the…the…shit.” Who did he have to call? The pills were definitely kicking in and the can was distracting. She looked around for someplace to put it, apart from just flinging it out into the yard, which was what all Mason’s boys were content to do with their trash but which Ana fucking Stark did not do at a client’s house, even if the client was that old bitch Mrs. Kellar’s meth-head son. But wait, that was it—throwing stuff away! “Call the garbage guys to come pick up the dump trailer,” she finished and smiled, triumphant. 

The smile was a mistake. He knew now. She could tell by the way he said, “Sure,” like he hadn’t even noticed. She needed to get out of here, now, before he could signal the rest of them. 

Ana turned her back on him, determined to project uncaring confidence, but only until she’d rounded the corner of the house and was out of his sight. Then she ran like the devil and Foxy himself was after her, past the herb garden and through the gate into the front yard, startling Mrs. Kellar and her three yappy Yorkies as they watered the roses with various fluids.

“Are you trying to give an old woman a heart attack?” Mrs. Kellar demanded, clutching at her enormous breast with the hand that did not hold the hose. “What in heaven’s name is wrong with you?”

“I’m on the drugs!” Ana shouted back at her and, practically cackling with relief at the ease of her escape, revved up the engine and pealed out of there while the old bitch literally shook her gnarled fist at her and called her a trashy little tramp.

Her elation was short-lived, roasted out of her in minutes by the truck’s aging air conditioner, blasting her with hot air. She shut it off and rolled down the window, but there was no discernable difference, so she rolled it back up and just sweated, sometimes also shivering, but unaware of it. She thought she might grab a cold soda at the gas station, but when she pulled in, she wasn’t alone. In all the time she’d been in town, there’d never been more than one other car at the pumps, but now there were three. Three! 

Could they all be part of Mason’s group? Rider had said Mason had ten times as many hands under him as Rider himself and Rider had almost two dozen horses in the stable that Ana knew of. Was it the town then? The whole town? Had Aunt Easter known? Was that why she was missing? Had they taken David to keep her quiet and then taken her too when they could no longer use him to control her? God, how had she not seen this before? It was so obvious. 

They were looking at her, all of them. The people pumping gas, the people paying for it, even the guy behind the counter—all staring at her. Their faces were too similar, as if they’d all been rendered from the same digital template. The scenery behind them looked flat and unreal. Even the sky was all the same color, a background hastily slapped together in a knock-off photo editor. She looked and saw a world that couldn’t possibly be real, but all the people in it were looking back at her, so who was the watcher and who the show?

Ana scrubbed a hand across her face, but she’d stopped sweating. Did that mean something? Prove something? It must, but she was afraid to know what. 

She put the truck into gear and backed up. A horn blared, disassociated from any car. She fumbled at the gear stick some more and managed to put it into drive. More horns screamed at her when she turned onto the street, but they didn’t chase her. Audio files, traffic sounds without context.

She tried to go home, but there was a park where her house used to be. The playground equipment was empty, motionless. What kind of playground didn’t have kids in it? 

It was a trap.

“Don’t be paranoid,” whispered Ana and jumped, looking wildly around the truck’s cab to see who was talking to her. Her eye lit on an empty can of Pepsi there on the seat beside her. She never drank Pepsi! 

_He was in the truck with her!_

Ana cranked down the window and threw the can out into the playground as far as she could. It hit the fake background right on a painted tree and bounced back at her, proving everything.

She stomped the gas and got the hell out of there, taking streets without thinking, running as she had always run, for the one safe place there had ever been for her. Aunt Easter’s house. She’d be at work still, she knew, but David must be home from school by now and he’d watch out for her until his mom got home. They’d protect her. 

Ana fled.

# * * *

The sun went down at 8:02, which meant having to get back on stage and listen to two whole minutes of Chica and Freddy doing their back-and-forth joke routine while Bonnie stood to one side and played a broken guitar; before those magic words: “UH OH, KIDS! LOOKS LIKE IT’S GETTING DARK. IT’S SAD TO SEE YOU GO, BUT I GUESS IT’S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE.”

And then sing it, which they did, waving to all the kids who were not filing past them and out the doors. When the song came to an end, Freddy finished his farewell monologue, said one last goodbye, and then Chica and Bonnie slumped forward and locked up, while Freddy snapped his eyes on and headed off-stage to make the first patrol. Summer was coming, the worst time of year for them, when all the kids were out of school and bored. Several had been by already to shake the barricade and peek in the windows. 

Few of them had the tenacity to make a real effort of it, but if they happened to try the West Exit, well, it didn’t take a genius to break in through a door Bonnie had already broken out. Two groups had already made it in. Mangle had been restless enough the first time that the trespassers had run off without making it any further than the dining room, screaming and laughing to prove they weren’t really scared, something that experience suggested meant they’d be back and with more friends.

The second group had mostly stayed outside, egging on their youngest friend to enter alone. The kid had taken almost ten minutes to go just from the door to the gift shop and there had gone through a peculiar ritual that Bonnie had first seen back at the very first Freddy’s—lighting a candle, using a mirror to look over his shoulder, and chanting, “Billy Blaylock,” five times. 

The first few times this had happened, none of them had known what to make of it other than it was weird, and so they’d gone ahead and run the kids off, which in retrospect was the worst possible response. Now, although it had been more than forty years since any of them had put in an appearance following this ritual, they were still coming. Hell, it had been fifty years since Billy had been taken. Did any of these kids even know who he was? For damn sure, none of them would want to successfully summon up the thing he had become. And Billy would have come, if he’d ever been close enough to hear. Bonnie didn’t think he could remember being Billy—none of the rest of them had any memories of their lives before this one—but Marion had told him who he’d been and the idea had provoked a terrible fascination in him. All his victims from that day on had been young boys and he would sit with their bodies for hours, posing them in lifelike ways around the pizzeria and mimicking them in his limited way, laughing Billy Blaylock’s happy pre-recorded laugh as he lived vicariously through their corpses at play.

But Billy was long dead and the thing that had been made from him was in pieces now, and the only parts that mattered were locked up below with _him_. 

The kid finished his senseless little ceremony, alone. After an hour or so, he snatched up a molding Freddy-bear for a trophy and fled, alive and well, and if he had a story to tell, it was all lies.

That was how it went most of the time, at least here. At the other restaurants, things had been different. They’d been on different settings then, playing the Purple Man’s game with anyone reckless or gullible enough to be in the building after closing. But they were on Day Mode now. They had a choice. And if the deciding factor had more to do with the fact that none of them were in any condition to chase anyone down anymore, well, it was still their choice to let them go. Live and let live, so to speak. As long as they were just looking for a place to get drunk or high or, as Foxy would put it, go fishing for kippers in a pink sea, they could go home when their dubious fun was done. If, on the other hand, they tried stripping the place for souvenirs or smashing what hadn’t already been smashed or brought out the spray paint, or if they started poking around in places they shouldn’t, they went to the quarry. 

But most nights passed without incident. Freddy spent too many of them trying to find some way to block off the West Exit without weakening the defenses at any other point of entry, but he had yet to say one word to Bonnie about why it was necessary. If he had, Bonnie would have apologized, because he was sorry about the kids getting in—the ones who’d come already and the ones who were surely coming later in the summer—but he couldn’t be too sorry. He couldn’t leave a light on for Ana, but at least he’d found a way to leave a door open. And as soon as he was able to move, he’d be there, checking the door and peeking through the boards that covered the windows, watching for her.

But for now, Bonnie could only listen, his head slumped forward and eyes shut (the simple pleasure of shutting his eyes had a bittersweet sting, inseparable from thoughts of the girl who’d made it possible, his Ana), as Freddy first checked the gift shop’s defenses and then moved on to the kitchen. He must be very restless tonight, because Bonnie heard the loading dock door rattle open right away. Its lock had been broken years ago, but Freddy kept it jammed with a table leg that could be pulled from this side, thus preserving its usefulness both as a defense and a door. All the same, he rarely went outside before midnight. The sun was only just down; Freddy was crazy to be walking around out there where anyone could see him. Eyes on and everything.

Not that he could say so. He could do nothing until the top of the next hour after the last of the staff left the building, which tonight meant nine o’clock, and still he knew he was lucky. If he were still set to Night Mode, as he had been during the Circle Drive site’s entire run, he would have to hold his position until midnight…and then play the Game. He was on Day Mode now. He had less than an hour trapped in his own body before he was free to move around. He supposed he couldn’t even say he was alone, since Chica was at the other end of the stage in her usual spot, but they couldn’t talk or even look at each other. All they had for company was the whirring of one another’s servos.

Bonnie mentally settled in, but he was scarcely into this last, longest wait, when Freddy came back into the dining room and said, “BONNIE. FOLLOW ME.”

Bonnie couldn’t leave the stage until nine o’clock and he couldn’t disobey Freddy’s orders. It hurt, in as much as any of them could feel pain, but when the phantom cramps faded out, Bonnie could move. Twitching, he put his guitar down and headed for the stairs. “Wh-Wh-What’s wrong-ong-ong?”

Freddy glanced at Chica, still motionless on the stage, but trembling where her joints were loosest. “NOTHING. FOLLOW ME.”

Interfering with a programmed routine wasn’t just painful, but potentially damaging. Freddy didn’t do it for ‘nothing’. On the other hand, if he wanted help running someone off, or down, Foxy was by far the better choice. And if they were under attack, even the threat of it, Freddy wouldn’t leave Chica frozen on stage and helpless to defend herself. But if they weren’t, what did Freddy need that was so important, he’d risk causing a fatal exception error and sending Bonnie into the black, perhaps permanently?

Apprehensive, trying to be ready for anything, Bonnie followed Freddy into the kitchen and then through it, into the storeroom. The loading dock door was wide open, or at least, open as far as it would go, which was about three-quarters of wide open. Freddy ducked under it and went outside onto the ledge, then stopped and looked back, waiting. When Bonnie joined him in the great wide open, he pointed. “WHAT HAVE YOU GOT THERE?” Freddy asked, his cheerful playback at odds with his serious frown.

Puzzled, Bonnie looked across the empty parking lot all the way to the sparse treeline before it dropped away into the desert. He was about to ask just what the hell he was looking for when he saw it. 

On the other side of the trees, canted at a dangerous angle on the uneven edge of the outcropping, was a truck.

Bonnie jerked, spitting out static in surprise, but before he could either duck back inside or ask Freddy what in the hell they were doing out here in full sight of whoever the fuck that was, Freddy gripped his shoulder and said, “IS. IT. HER.”

Her? Bonnie looked again at the truck and blurted more static when he realized he did in fact recognize it. 

It was Ana’s truck. 

He did not think. He jumped off the loading dock, cracking the pavement and his feet (and for damn sure not doing his knee any favors).

“BONNIE,” Freddy began, then sighed. “GO. JUST. GO.”

Bonnie didn’t need to be told. He was already gone, moving just as fast as his protesting crankshaft would allow, and leaving Freddy to take the stairs and follow at his own sensible speed. He slowed down when he reached the truck however. There was a path of sorts leading down from this plateau to the desert below, but it was at the other end of the lot, where the ground sloped anyway; here, it was at least fifty feet straight down, with nothing but a bunch of rocks waiting to break the fall, and the bones, of anyone unlucky enough to lose their footing.

And the truck’s left front tire was only half on the ground, he noted, leaning out to check just that before he even touched the vehicle itself. With the sensor plates on his hands gummed up like they were, he could lean on something, thinking he was just steadying himself, and never know he was pushing it until it slid away. 

“IS. IT. HER,” Freddy asked again, still crossing the lot.

“It look-k-ks like hers.” Bonnie turned on his eyes and cupped them to see through the tinted windows of the truck’s bed-cover. He saw a tool box, an assortment of power tools, an open case of bottled water and a sleeping bag. “Yeah, p-p-pretty sure it’s hers, b-b-but she’s not here. You’re sure she’s n-n—NOT A PROBLEM—not inside?”

“I. DIDN’T. LOOK. BUT. I DON’T THINK SO.” Freddy stepped off the pavement onto the uneven ground and looked the truck over grimly. “SHE. WOULD. HAVE.” He clicked to himself for a moment. “PUT. THIS. SOMEWHERE. BETTER.”

No. No one parked like this. The whole lot was empty and the truck was in the trees. Really in them, not to mention how close it was to falling off the cliff. Bonnie broke off a few branches in an attempt to clear a walking path, but he still couldn’t fit his huge unfeeling body between the trees and the truck and was afraid to try.

Freddy grunted, reading the situation for himself and probably doing a better job of it. “STAY HERE,” he ordered and stepped back up onto the pavement. He circled around the trees, broke a few branches of his own, and came down again in front of the truck. Bracing himself on the hood, he leaned forward, raking his eyes across the windshield.

“Is she in t-th-there?” Bonnie asked.

“NO,” said Freddy. He looked around, moved half a step toward the drop, and looked down. He grunted and stepped back, actually taking his hat off and scratching at the back of his head as he thought. “BUT. SHE’S. NOT. DOWN. THERE,” he said, almost to himself. He scanned the lot, his head rotating all the way around, and when he came back to the truck, he frowned.

“What-t-t do we d-d-do?”

Freddy glanced at him, then bent, arms wide, and found a gripping place on the wheel wells. He grunted again.

Bonnie obeyed, finding handholds of his own on the truck frame. “We’re not-t-t tested for this,” he warned, if only to acknowledge out loud that the risk was there so Freddy wouldn’t have to.

Freddy leaned out to eye the drop and the tire that was resting a good four inches on open air. “I’M. NOT. LEAVING. IT. HERE,” he said. “READY, KIDS? ON THREE! ONE, TWO, THREE!”

They lifted. The pitch of their servos ramped up to a bee-like whine, but although Bonnie’s bad knee wheezed and Freddy’s arm-casing cracked right up to the elbow, both their joints held. They walked the truck back just far enough that there were no trees blocking the passenger door and set it down again. Freddy was closer, but still Bonnie made it there ahead of him.

The windows were rolled all the way down, making an easy handhold out of the door so he didn’t have to worry about shoving his huge hands in through the tiny human-sized latch. He just caught the door itself, pulling so he couldn’t inadvertently push, and bent cumbersomely to look inside.

Except for Ana’s worn-out army surplus duffel bag, the seat was empty, but the keys were still in the ignition. He tried to tell himself that was promising, that it meant she had to have driven here, but he couldn’t make himself believe it. He—the man Bonnie could only think of as the Purple Man, even in his own mind, after all these years—He had driven plenty of cars that weren’t his, with plenty of people tied up in back, waiting for him to take them out. And the quarry wasn’t that far away, a perfect place to dump a body, which he damned well knew, having dumped his share.

But who would drive the truck up here and park it on the unstable ledge of the outcrop when it was so easy to just go a few hundred feet further down the road and then drive out across the flat desert all the way to the quarry? There hadn’t been room for a man to exit through either door, much less drag a struggling woman out with him. 

Maybe she hadn’t been struggling. God, he could feel his heart stop and he didn’t even have one.

But wait a minute. Just wait. Be calm. Bonnie forced his eyes open, unaware of just when the black had started creeping in, and told himself again there hadn’t been room for those doors to open. The passenger door had been wedged right into the trees; the driver’s door, hanging out over that bone-breaking drop. 

He took half a step back, concentrating on his hand’s greatly diminished fine motor skills, and hooked his pinkie finger under the latch. He pulled, making himself go slow so he couldn’t snap the fucking thing off by accident, and the door opened. He caught the frame, pulled it all the way open—again, taking pains not to break it off its hinges—looked down and there she was, curled impossibly small on the truck’s floor in front of him.

Relief shattered before it had even finished surging; she wasn’t moving.

“Ana?” He moved the door aside (too hard. It would never close right again) and caught her by the arm. Too late, he was able to recognize how red it was, how sunburnt, but she didn’t wake up with a cry of pain or swat at him or do anything at all. She hung limp and silent as he pulled her out of the truck, her hair matted to her scalp and braid hanging like a dead cat’s tail. There was a leaf stuck to it, catching and holding his attention in a manner that suggested he was not handling this as well as he thought he was. He tried to ignore it and couldn’t. Here was Ana, dangling over his arm with her mouth gaping and her eyes glued shut, and that leaf, that goddamned _leaf_!

He plucked it out and her eyes opened.

She did not see him right away. Her eyes, her amazing eyes, so clear and light and brilliantly blue, were blind. Then the pupils opened up (how strange, not to hear them whining), filling her eyes, eclipsing them, and for a moment, they stared at each other. 

She took a breath, gasped it in like it was the first she’d ever taken in her life, and heaved herself out of his arms to throw her own around his neck and slap her entire body against his. She held on and he held her and for as long as it lasted, everything was all right.

Then her legs folded up and she slipped right out of his hands and crumpled to the ground at his feet, unconscious again. 

Bonnie picked her up, folding her arms across her body until she could be carried in the crook of his arm. Her legs dangled. Her head lolled. She should have looked like a sleeping child. She didn’t. She looked like a dead one.

“What-t-t-t’s wrong-ong-ong with her?” he asked, patting at her flushed, dry cheek. “Is she-e-eeeeeeee sick-k-k?”

“BE CALM. YOU. CAN’T. HELP. HER. IF. YOU. GO. BLACK.”

“I’m not-t-t. I’m fine. I’m c-c-c—CHOREAL EPISODES INDICATIVE OF SELF-INFLICTED EXCEPTIONS—calm. Who th-th-the fuck-k-k cares about-t-t me?” he exploded. “What’s wrong-ong-ong with _her_?”

Freddy glanced over at the bar of vibrant magenta on the horizon that marked the place the sun had set. “IT’S. HOT.”

“It can’t-t-t be that-t-t hot,” Bonnie argued, holding Ana out as proof. “She’s not-t-t even sweating-ing.”

“SHE. ISN’T.” Freddy pushed Ana’s hair back and squinted at her face. It was obvious she’d been in the sun. Her skin was burned to a shiny pink where except where being pressed to the floor of her truck had turned it a deep brick red. But the sunburn was the only color on her skin. Freddy lifted her arms, checked her back, even took one of her boots off and looked at her feet. All dry and white as bone. “THIS. IS. BAD. BONNIE.”

“Bad? But…But-t-t she’s okay, right-t-t?”

“NO,” said Freddy as he pulled the protective casing off his left ring finger, exposing his last good sensor plate on either of his hands. He touched the vein at the side of Ana’s neck and frowned. “SHE’S. NOT. OKAY. WE. NEED. TO. COOL. HER. DOWN.”

“How?” he asked. “The wat-t-ter doesn’t-t-t work. There’s no p-p-power, there’s n-n-n—NO PIZZA LIKE FAZBEAR PIZZA!—no A/C. What d-d-do we d-d-d—DO YOU CALL A BEAR WITH NO TEETH?—do? D-Do we c-c-call 911? She’s g-g-got a mobile phone. Where’s her-r-r phone?”

“WE. CAN’T,” said Freddy.

“Sure, we c-c-can! Chica! Chica’s f-f-fingers are— _CONNECTED TO THE WRIST BONE_ —small enough. She can p-p-push the buttons and I c-c-can talk! Or Foxy! F-F-Foxy sounds the most-t-t human!”

“I. MEAN. WE. WON’T.” Freddy looked at him, still feeling at Ana’s pulse. “I. WILL. NOT. BRING. PEOPLE. HERE. NOT. FOR. ANY. REASON.” 

“But she c-c-could…I mean, c-c-can she d-d-d—DISKINESIC ANAMOLIES INCREASING—die? Look-k-k at her! What-t-t if she d-d-dies, F-F—FREDDY FAZBEAR!—Freddy? What if sh-sh-she-e- _eeeeee_ —”

“NOT. FOR. ANY. REASON,” Freddy said again. He held his stare long enough to drive it in, then looked back down at Ana and turned away, moving toward the rear of the truck. “TAKE. HER. INSIDE.”

Bonnie didn’t stick around to argue or even to see what Freddy was doing in Ana’s truck. He got a more secure grip on her—God, he’d give anything just to know how hard he was holding her—and hurried for the restaurant as fast as he dared to go.

Chica was still on stage, head down, eyes shut. Bonnie limped across the dining room, saying, “It’s-s-s Ana. She’s s-s-sick,” for her benefit, but didn’t offer further explanations. He lay Ana out on the table, arranged her arms and legs so she looked a little less dead—a little—and then could do nothing but pet her and feel helpless.

A few minutes passed. Ana breathed and that was all.

The loading dock door rattled down and slammed shut. Soon, Freddy ducked through the kitchen door, carrying the case of water that had been in the back of the truck. He put it down on the stage, saying, “CHICA, FOLLOW ME.” When her spasms ended and her eyes snapped open, he pointed first at Ana, then at the water and grunted.

“OKAY, FREDDY,” Chica agreed, nodding as she shuffled to the steps and clutched at the wall.

“BONNIE. HELP. CHICA,” Freddy ordered and left again in the direction of Pirate Cove.

“I’ll b-b-be r-r—RIGHT FOOT IN—right b-b-back, baby g-g-girl,” Bonnie whispered, patting Ana’s slack hand, then rushed to the stage. He grabbed Chica by the waist as she reached for his hand, swung her around just like he did during their dance numbers, and put her on the ground. He didn’t let go right away, even though every circuit was burning with the need to get back to Ana. “You ok-k-kay?”

Chica had caught his arms when he’d seized her. She looked at her hands now, just resting on his where he still gripped her waist. Her eyelids tipped on an upward slant. She nodded.

Bonnie let go, waited to make sure she had her balance, then spun away and dragged his useless fucking leg back to Ana.

Chica joined him with a bottle of water in each hand. The caps were sealed in some crazily complicated way, but she didn’t fuss with them long. She made one effort to pull them off, then just squeezed the bottle in her fist until it popped like a balloon. 

When the water hit Ana’s chest, her back arched so violently, Bonnie could have fit his hand underneath and never touched her or the table. Her eyes snapped open and again, she gasped that deep, primal gasp, and then she dropped back atop the table, panting. She looked at Chica blankly, then at Bonnie. One second’s stillness, then she surged and grabbed him, her fingers scrabbling over his casing until he caught and steadied her.

“He’s in my house,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, not just hushed, but dried and cracked as hardpan. “How did he do that? I was driving. I left him at his house and when I got home, he was already there! I could hear him in the attic! I could hear him coming down the stairs!”

“It’s ok-k-kay, Ana. You’re okay. You’re safe with-th-th me.”

“I’m not safe. I’m never safe. I didn’t know where to go. He owns everything! Everyone! He knows everything!” Confusion shadowed her flushed face, clouding those beautiful eyes. “He knows I’m here. No. No no no no.” She began to struggle in his arms, like a paper doll fluttering in the breeze. “I have to get out of here! I can’t let him find me here!”

“It’s all r-r-right, baby girl. Be c-c-calm.”

“No!” she rasped, wild-eyed and trembling. “I can’t let him find me here. I can’t let him…find you!” Her grip, weak as it was, couldn’t last. She slipped through his hands, thumping her head hard on the table, but made no sign of pain, only mumbled, “I have to go. Let me go.”

“No,” said Bonnie, brushing matted strands of hair away from her brow. 

“He’ll come after me, don’t you get it?” she moaned. “He’s after me! He’ll follow me here!”

“Oh. Oh, b-b-baby, let him come,” said Bonnie seriously. 

“Who?” Foxy came into the room from the West Hall and stopped short, his head cocking. “What the b-b-bloody—? Her again?”

“F-Fr-Freddy didn’t t-t-tell you?”

“Just broke me out early and t-t-told me ye needed help.” Foxy took another step, his eyes narrowing. “What the hell is wrong with-th-th her?”

“SUMMER IS GREAT!” chirped Chica, popping the second water bottle over Ana’s head and letting the water splash down into her hair. “BUT IT CAN BE DANGEROUS TO GET TOO HOT, SO STAY COOL AND NEVER, EVER LEAVE PETS IN A PARKED CAR!”

Foxy scratched at the side of his muzzle, sorting that out. Chica didn’t have the knack of interrupting her playbacks, even after all this time, and only spoke in full phrases clipped from her speech files. What she said wasn’t always what she meant. “Were she in a c-c-car?” he asked at last.

“Yeah, her t-t-truck,” said Bonnie. 

“Why d-d-didn’t she just come in? She ain’t shy about b-b—BONES TO DAVY JONES—busting in when she wants to.”

“I don’t-t-t know. She was hiding-ing-ing from someone. She nearly drove off the c-c-cliff trying-ing to get behind the t-t-trees.” Bonnie caught Ana’s flailing hand and patted it until she quieted. “She thinks someone’s af-f-f—AFTER THE SET—after her, that-t-t he’ll follow her here.”

Foxy made a sound somewhere between a growl, a grunt, and a laugh and went to the stage for a bottle of water. He, too, had trouble with the cap, but he didn’t fuss with it long before stabbing his hook through the plastic, top and bottom. Leaning up against the wall, he held the bottle out and watched Ana squirm and bat at the drops trickling over her. “These were in the t-t-truck with her, eh? They’re likely hot-t-t as hell, ye know.”

Chica nodded and shrugged. “SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO DO THE BEST YOU CAN WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT.”

“For that matter, be it any c-c-cooler in here than it be outside?”

They all looked around, as if there were any clues to the temperature hidden on the walls or ceiling.

“I th-th-think so,” Bonnie said, uncertainty lifting his words into something that was almost a question. “She already looks b-b-better.”

“This be better, eh?” Foxy squeezed the last of the water out and tossed the bottle away, then put his hook through the top of her braid and used it to force her head back. He pried an eye open and switched his on so they could all see her pupils contract before opening all the way up again. “She’s high.”

“So?” Bonnie said defensively.

“So if she’s over-r-r—OVERBOARD—overheated, maybe we’re c-c-cooling her off, but if she’s OD’ing, we’re just making her wet-t-t while she dies.”

“Foxy?” Ana’s other eye fluttered open. 

“Aye, lass,” he said, unhooking her hair and taking his hand back. He leaned on the table instead and switched his eyes off. “It’s me.”

“I knew it was you,” she whispered, turning her face away. The water beading over her open eyes pooled and fell down her cheeks like tears. “I knew it.”

“Oh aye? What g-g-gave me away, lass? Me g-g-golden voice or me rakish good-d-d looks?”

She reached up one shaking hand and wiped at her face, then turned her wet palm up to him, showing him the water trickling down her skin. “You always let me drown.” Her eyes shut again. Her hand smacked down to the tabletop and her panting breaths slowed. 

Foxy watched her a few seconds, then looked at Chica. “I want it on the r-r-record, I never d-dr-drowned anyone. I don’t-t-t know where she’s getting that.”

Chica’s nod became a spasm and she blurted out, “I LOVE LISTENING TO RECORDS,” then grabbed at her beakless mouth, her eyes wide.

“Coo, that-t-t were an old one,” said Foxy, almost admiringly. “Yer showing yer age, luv. Do they even m-m-make records anymore?” 

Chica sniffed and waddled over to the stage for another bottle of water.

Foxy whistled after her, then straightened and fixed Bonnie with a grim stare. “Girl needs a hospital.”

“Freddy won’t-t-t let me call.” Frustration simmered, but couldn’t boil. Freddy was only doing what he thought was right and even Bonnie couldn’t argue with his reasons. He patted some more at Ana’s hand, limp in his own, and hesitantly said, “He d-d-didn’t tell you not to c-c-call, did he?”

Foxy’s ears pricked, then he dropped his eyepatch and tipped his head to show a thin slice of a smile. “Chary of ye. I always says, everyone’s got a little p-p-pirate in ‘em.”

“Did he?” Bonnie pressed.

“No, but-t-t what am I like to say? ‘Never ye m-m-mind who I be, get ye an ambulance out to Freddy Fazbear’s P-P-Pizzeria right quick-k-k! We g-g-got a lass d-d-down on the d-d—DAVY JONES—deck!’ And that weren’t d-d-deliberate,” he added, thumbing back over his shoulder as if to point at his words of a moment ago. “Sure as I hears a human voice, I’ll b-b-be spitting up ahoys and yars for miles. And what’s she like to s-s-say?” he went on, now pointing at Chica, returning with the water.

“HI THERE,” Chica said obediently, her eyes showing a resignation at odds with her cheery tone. “SUMMER IS MY FAVORITE TIME OF YEAR, BUT LET’S STAY SAFE OUT THERE WHEN THE WEATHER GETS WARM!”

“You d-d-don’t have to talk-k-k like that,” Bonnie insisted. “I know it’s hard-d-d to b-br-br—BRACHIOCEPHALIC CLUSTER—break through the first-t-t t-t-t—TIME TO ROCK—time, but-t-t it gets easier. Just-t-t try, Ch-Chica, p-p-please!”

“Do ye hear yerself, lad?” Foxy asked quietly.

“It t-t-t-t…It t-t-takes years t-t-to g-g-get this bad!”

“It only t-t-takes once to go b-b-black and well ye know it.”

“I LIKE TO HELP MY FRIENDS,” said Chica, her eyes darting back and forth between them. She clicked, twitching just a little with each one, then haltingly said, “YOU’LL NEVER KNOW UNLESS YOU TRY. I. CAN. TRY. JUST DO YOUR BEST! TRY TRY TRY HARDER!” The water bottles slipped from her hands and bounced away. She did not seem to notice. Her eyes were shut tight, her plastic brows pinched together in concentration. “WHERE. IS. THE. FUN TODAY! I CAN DO DO DO DO THIS. WHAT’S. THE. NUMBER. LET’S COUNT TOGETHER! I CAN I CAN I CAN I CAN DO YOUR BEST!”

Bonnie reached out with the hand not holding Ana’s and touched her violently-jerking head.

Her spasms slowed and stopped. She looked at him, her dilated lenses slow to contract. “I’M SORRY,” she said, still shivering. 

“It’s ok-k-kay,” he said. It wasn’t, but it wasn’t her fault. “I shouldn’t-t-t have asked. I’m sorry, Ch-Chica. Thanks for t-tr-trying.”

“We ain’t g-g-got the phone anyway,” Foxy pointed out. “Besides, ain’t-t-t we got enough kids poking around without stirring up fresh-sh-sh excitement? Ye let it get-t-t around a girl passed out in our parking lot-t-t and the next th-thing ye know, the story’ll go ye were running d-d-down the street with her severed arms in both yer hands, eating b-b-babies. The whole b-b-bleeding town will be creeping in our d-d-damned windows again and ye know how th-th-that’ll end.”

Ana shifted, not quite waking. She pressed her face to Bonnie’s body and slumped again, silent.

Foxy watched her settle, then pulled air through his fans and looked at Bonnie, grave. “Ye know F-Fr-Freddy’s got the right of this.”

Bonnie patted Ana’s shoulders as she roused again at the sound of Foxy’s voice. “Yeah.”

“And she d-d-do look better, I reckon. Lucid-like, more’n she would-d-d be if she were OD’ing. Lord knows, we seen enough o’ those around here to know how that-t-t looks,” he muttered, scratching at his muzzle. “Bad-d-d trip is all. Letting her sleep-p-p it off somewhere dark and quiet, best thing for her.” He picked up one of the water bottles, poked a few holes in it, and watered Ana like a plant, now looking around the dining room. “Where is he, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” Bonnie mumbled, stroking Ana’s sunburned arm, slung around his hip. He didn’t care either, but he kept that to himself.

In any case, they didn’t have long to wonder about it. Before Foxy had emptied this latest water bottle, Freddy’s footsteps could be heard in the East Hall. He appeared, eyes lit but not flashing, and came without speaking to the table where Ana lay. “THAT’S. NOT. WHAT. I. MEANT,” he said, looking her damp clothes over, then shrugged. “BUT. IT. PROBABLY. HELPS. GIVE. HER. TO. ME.”

When Bonnie halfheartedly nudged her toward Freddy’s waiting hands, Ana only squirmed back against him, but Freddy merely plucked her arms from Bonnie’s casing and pulled her away. Pressing her flat to the table with one hand, he bit the casing off his good finger and touched the sensor plate to her throat. He grunted approvingly, capped his finger, and released her. As she crawled back to Bonnie, Freddy turned to Foxy. “I. WANT. YOU. OUTSIDE. KEEP. WATCH. SHE. THINKS. SOME. ONE. IS. FOLLOWING. HER.”

Foxy nodded once, but didn’t go. Instead, he said, “And what-t-t do ye think?”

“I. THINK. SHE’S. SCARED.” Freddy glanced back at Ana, curled tightly around Bonnie’s hip like a belt. “AND. SHE. DOESN’T. SCARE. EASY.”

Foxy snorted. “That’s for d-d-damn sure, but ye know she ain’t-t-t in her right mind at the moment.”

“YES,” said Freddy before Bonnie could protest. “BUT. IS. SHE. SCARED. BECAUSE. SHE’S. HI! OR. IS. SHE. HI! BECAUSE. SHE’S. SCARED.” He pointed toward the kitchen. “YOU. GO. BONNIE. AND. I…” He paused, glancing again at Ana, then grumbled to himself and amended, “CHICA. AND. I. WILL. KEEP. WATCH. INSIDE.” His eye lingered on Ana before he looked at Bonnie. “DON’T. LET. HER. DO. THAT. REMEMBER. HOW. MUCH. HEAT. WE.” He clicked a few times, settling with obvious annoyance on, “MAKE.”

Reluctantly, Bonnie pried Ana off him and took half a step back, but as soon as they were all gone (Foxy gave him a particularly knowing look on his way to the door), he closed that small distance again and let her crawl back into his arms. “It’s okay,” he told her as she hid herself against his unfeeling body. “You’re ok-k-kay. I’ve g-g-got you, baby girl.”

She did not respond. He couldn’t even be sure she heard him. All he could do was keep saying it and hold her closer when she woke enough to cry. It wasn’t really sleep, Bonnie thought, but he hoped it was quiet, wherever she was.


	15. Chapter 15

# CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ana’s headache woke her from a dreamless sleep, but into such perfect darkness that when she finally gained the capacity to think beyond a reptilian perception of pain, she thought she had gone blind. The thought, as abstractly alarming as it was, could not quite penetrate the headache, however. She could not panic, only accept the terrifying new circumstances of her existence and go back to sleep. 

She was still blind when she woke again. It was a testament to her somewhat improved state of being that this disturbed her. She touched her eyelids to make sure they were open. They were. She also still had the headache. It swelled as she sat up and again as she turned her head left to right, seeking and failing to find even a trace of light in her surroundings.

Where was she? The air felt close around her, hot and damp and too heavy on her skin. There were layers of unwholesome smells: dried mildew, rotten sheetrock, the sick mineral stink of old blood—a smell any woman who had ever lost a pair of panties behind the hamper at the wrong time of the month knew well—but they combined in some indefinable way to form a soothing whole. Somewhere behind the headache, she knew where she was; she chose to trust that instinct and was not afraid.

Of further comfort to her was the familiar feel and musky smell of her sleeping bag. Not just a sleeping bag. Hers. She lay on it, but not in the bed of her truck where she’d last slept. The floor beneath her was just that—a floor. It had a carpet, not very thick, but padded somehow so that even the sound of her patting at it was muffled and difficult to hear. The walls were also padded, covered over in a canvas-like material, stiff and grungy, unpleasant to feel.

Holy shit, was she in a padded cell? Had she gone full-on crazypants down the streets of Mammon and been locked up in the nearest lunatic asylum? They still had those, right? Or, by the smell of it, had they opened one up again just for her?

But no…no, why would they lock her up with her own sleeping bag? Or, for that matter, her boots? She touched them to be sure, but already knew just by the feel of them on her feet that the laces were still tied. Ana herself had never been arrested, but plenty of other horses in Rider’s stables had and from them she knew if one went crazypants enough to warrant a padded cell, one did not go in it shoelaces intact. She was also wearing her belt, the buckle of which had a blade in the back. She could not possibly be locked up.

So where was she? And why did it feel so familiar?

Ana rolled onto her hands and knees and from there, onto her feet. The headache made every shift in altitude pure hell. Was she hungover? She felt hungover. Headache, unsteady stomach, drymouth…it fit. What the hell had she taken to fucking _blind_ herself? Her memories of the previous day were half-sketched and full of holes, but she couldn’t think of anything. A couple Ritalin in the morning and that was it. Maybe something later, at Mason’s house…maybe…or maybe not. It was all confused.

God, she hurt. In her joints, in her muscles, in her skin. Mostly her skin. Touching her arm was like lightly brushing herself with sterno and setting it on fire. Sunburn. That’s right. She’d been working on the deck and then…she hadn’t been. Everything after that was hopelessly blurred, like flipping through a book, seeing letters and occasionally whole words, but mostly only seeing the patterns they made with broken lines and paragraphs. She had only one clear picture…and it terrified her too much to think about it right now.

Enough of this mystery-solver shit. How it happened did not matter. She was blind. She had to find her phone, figure out how to call 911 without seeing the screen, and get her ass to a hospital.

Ana felt her way along the wall, her fingers dipping in and out of tears in the canvas, once encountering something that felt like a poster, laminated and then scaled over by dried mold. It calmed her without informing her. She moved on.

The door had a push-bar instead of a latch or a knob. This held no special meaning for her apart from the simple mechanics of how to open it. She pushed and stepped out into a hallway. She did not immediately process how she knew it was a hall and not another room; she still thought she was blind as she turned herself toward the source of the faint light outlining the open space at the far end of the hall to her left. She stumbled toward it, holding her hands to the wall to guide her because she _still_ thought, looking right at that light, she was blind.

Freddy was onstage, midway through his magic act. She had been hearing the good-natured rise and fall of his bearish voice ever since opening the door (her headache corresponded, spiking and twisting with every sound), but had not processed it and did not process it now. She scanned the room, but did not see her pack, which had her phone in it and she needed that to call 911 because she was blind, so she felt her way along the wall to the stage, and then staggered along that—reaching out once in passing to grip Bonnie’s hand; he twitched hard, fingers jittering as if trying to close—until she was back against a wall. Gratefully, she followed that to the West Hall door and out into the hall that led to Tux and the side exit.

The sun was straight overhead, blurring out the vision she did not have with the intensity of its gaze and ramping up the headache until she could taste it in her mouth. It tasted coppery, like blood. She staggered out into the parking lot and looked stupidly around at nothing. Where was her truck? Her pack was in her truck. Her phone was in her pack. She had to find it. 

The light and the heat sapped her meager reserve of energy. She wanted to turn back several times, when only the thought of that nice, dark, still room waiting for her kept her going. Once she had her phone (she no longer knew why she needed it so urgently), she could go back to bed and sleep off this colossal headache. 

Her determination was rewarded. Her truck was in the back lot, hidden behind the trees like a stegosaurus hiding behind a picket fence. 

“Hell of a nice parking job there, dipshit,” she told herself, trudging across the cracked asphalt. So hot. Why did it have to be so hot? Maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as yesterday, but it was still ridiculously hot for being the middle of May, not to mention how bright it was. It was almost a relief just to step off the lot and though the trees onto the ground and see—

See just one fuck of a deep drop. 

And then see her tires so close to the edge that she looked out and over to see if she was lying broken on the rocks below. She was not, but the relief was shallow compared to the magnitude of what might have happened. The ledge narrowed and sloped steeper considerably after this point. Another three feet and she’d have driven right off.

She had by this time forgotten her blindness, so that when she reached her truck and opened it to get her pack, she could no longer remember why she’d wanted it. However, she could figure that out somewhere out of the sun, she decided. 

She headed back to the building, dragging her pack behind her because she couldn’t bear its weight on her shoulder. The parking lot had grown behind her back; it was easily twice as far to go on return, but at least the sun was behind her now, clawing up her back and sitting on her head instead of slashing at her eyes. Once she had crawled through the broken door into the West Hall, she felt much better, and although Freddy’s booming voice struck like a hammer made of shards of glass on her naked ears, being back in the dining room felt better still.

Until her phone rang.

She felt the rusty railroad spike slam into her skull from behind before she ever heard the sound, she would have sworn on that in a court of law. Her ears were bleeding. And her eyes. And possibly her finger- and toenails. The floor rose up and hit her knees, then her face. The walls spun. The phone kept ringing and a part of her knew it was the same electronic trill it had always been, but the rest of her didn’t care because her brain was being sliced down the middle by piano wire made of sound.

The ringing would have stopped on its own, she knew, but she just couldn’t wait that long. Scratching her pack open, Ana found the source of the noise and slapped it until it shut up. The quiet hammered at her almost as hard, but not for long. 

“You there?”

Rider’s voice, tinny through the phone’s speakers. She slapped it again, then rolled onto her back and concentrated on just holding her head on. It took both hands.

“Anyone? Come on now, what the hell? Say something!” Rider’s voice changed in an instant, rough and full and so much more real, he might have pushed his ghost all the way through the speaker and into the room with her. “If this ain’t Ana Stark, you got two seconds to put her on the line, or I will go full Liam Neeson on your sorry ass, believe me, son.”

“I can’t,” Ana said in the loudest whisper she could bring herself to voice in the echo chamber of her aching skull. “I can’t talk right now. Please go away, light yourself on fire, and die.”

Rider let out a woof of air that was half-annoyance, half-relief. “Yeah, sure, okay, but only because you said please. Shit, you had me going there for a sec. Wake your ass up, darlin’. I got shit to do today that don’t include you. You got that date for me?”

“What?”

“The inspection.”

Ana pried her eyes open and peered over at the phone. “What?”

“Say ‘what’ again, I dare you,” Rider said in his I’m-still-in-a-good-mood-but-you’re-pushing-it voice. “It’s after noon, woman. Pull it the fuck together!”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I have a headache.”

“That don’t work on me unless we’re fucking. Wake up. I waited on your call all last night and all this morning and I am done waiting. Quit rolling your fucking eyes at me,” he snapped. He had to mean someone on his end of the phone, because Ana’s eyes were made of sandpaper and the last she wanted to do was roll them. “I’m busy here. Go make a sandwich or something. Ana!”

“What?”

A deep breath. A lengthy exhale. Rider said, with that exceptionally gentle manner that meant he was seriously annoyed, “Do you or do you not remember calling me yesterday and asking me for help?”

Ana closed her eyes and thought. It was a lot like slapping a brick wall in which her brain was both the hand and the bricks. “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? Were you high?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I guess.”

“Jesus Christ, figures. I knew you didn’t sound right. Forget it,” he said, now pissed and not bothering to hide it. If she were anyone else, or maybe just if she were in the room with him, this was where it might get ugly, but all Rider said was, “Go back to sleep. Call me when you get your fucking head on and can commit yourself to maybe not wasting my goddamn time.”

A click. Dead air.

Ana rolled over and curled small, dozing on her cool, damp, reeking, broken bed of tiles while Freddy fired jokes like cannonballs directly into her brain.

The phone rang.

She came up, jaws clenched, both hands clamped to her forehead just above her eyes, where the spike’s sharp point protruded after shattering into her from behind, and as soon as the first trill subsided, she rolled and smacked the phone quiet.

“Wake up,” said Rider, no longer pissed. “Never in all the years I known you have you gotten high on a job. So. What the actual fuck happened to you yesterday?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Ana, still clutching her head in one hand and the phone in the other.

“You don’t know? How the hell do you not know?”

“Leave me alone, Rider. My head—”

“Fuck your head, pony. Sit your ass up right now.”

Ana sighed, braced her hands against the nasty, clammy, sticky floor, and heaved herself up against the enormous weight of the air. Once her head and stomach stopped moving, she kick-dragged herself back and leaned into the wall. Then she picked up the phone and held it loosely in both hands. “Okay.”

“You up?”

“Yeah.”

“Eyes open?”

“I guess.”

“You called me yesterday afternoon. Do you remember doing that?”

“Rider, I barely remember doing this now.”

“I am not playing with you, woman. Answer the goddamn question.”

“No.” Ana spied half a case of bottled water over on the edge of the show stage and, after some consideration, decided it really was the one from the back of her truck. Her mouth instantly dried, but she could not imagine getting up and going all the way over to get one any more than she could imagine sprouting glittery wings and flying. Defeated, she leaned back into the wall again and let her eyes slide shut. “I don’t mean ‘no, I won’t,’ I mean ‘no, I don’t.’ What did I want?”

“Later. Right now, I ask the questions. What is the last thing you remember?”

“I don’t know.” Again and for the first time, Ana looked at the stage and made the first tenuous connection between its existence and hers. “What the…? How…? What am I doing here?”

“If I have to tell you one more time to answer me, I’ll be doing it in person. Is that what you want?”

Ana started to shake her head, winced, and stopped that immediately. “What was the question?”

“What is the last thing you remember?”

“When?”

“Yesterday! God fucking damn it, are you doing this on purpose?”

“Doing what?” Ana saw the stage and Freddy on it, his hat in one hand and the other hovering over it, motionless. His head was tipped, his eyes on her rather than the hat. “What are you doing here?” she asked, bewildered, then looked around yet again. “Wait a minute, you’re not here, I am. What am _I _doing here? Have I been here this whole time? What day is it?”__

“Who are you talking to?”

“Rider?” She looked at the phone in her hands and, with effort, realized she had been talking to him for some time already. “Holy shit, I am legit scrambled this morning. Can you call me back?”

“No. Start talking.”

“About what?”

“Yesterday. Tell me everything you know about yesterday.”

“Rider, I can’t—”

“I said _now_ , pony.”

Ana sighed, closed her eyes, opened them and said, “It was hot. I was staining the deck. I got…sick or something. It was so hot. Mason gave me something to drink. I don’t…can’t…see it clearly. Everything’s all fucked up after that.”

A long silence followed. Ana could hear Rider breathing, but that was all. After a moment, the oddness of that fact sank all the way in and she made herself push through the headache and look at the stage, where Freddy stood silent, watching her. Bonnie and Chica were still playing their broken or absent instruments. Freddy still had his hat in one hand, preparatory to pulling a Bonnie-plushie out of it, but he wasn’t performing or talking or moving. Just watching her. Listening.

“Okay,” said Rider, shattering the thin ice of her solid thoughts into ten thousand disconnected fragments again. “Start at the beginning. Wherever the beginning is, that’s where you start. You, out. Go home.”

A man’s voice, indistinct.

“It’s cancelled. I’ll let you know the new plan soon as I can.”

The other voice, raised but still unclear, protesting.

“Get,” said Rider, softly, “the fuck out of my house or I will shoot you in the fucking face.” A moment of silence. Then Rider said, still soft, “Go on, darlin’. Start talking. And remember as you do so that, regardless of my tender feelings for you and all your years of loyal service, if you lie to me, I will make you so fucking sorry, you will be the first person of your generation to use the words ‘rue the day’ unironically. Now. What happened yesterday?”

“It was hot,” said Ana again, because that was where the book of that memory began. “The job at the Kellar house is almost over and I admit I may have been pushing it, trying to finish sooner rather than later. Last job is the deck. I was staining the deck and I got too hot. I got sick. I stopped working. Mason…here’s where it starts to get fuzzy…Mason brought me a drink. No, I don’t know if it was open. I couldn’t even tell you what it was. It was cold and it was sweet. Everything after that is fucked up. I left. I don’t remember leaving, I was just gone. I went home. I don’t remember how I got there, I was just in the foyer. Mason was in the house. He did not bring me home, he was just there, waiting for me.”

“Stop,” said Rider. “We need to be extra-super-clear on this. Mace Kellar was in your house?”

“Someone was. I think it was him, if only because I don’t know who else it would have been.”

“But you didn’t see him?”

Rider’s neutral tone and Freddy’s narrowed eyes combined in some mystic way to create a whole skeptic.

“I was out of it, but I wasn’t just being paranoid,” Ana said, telling Freddy as much as Rider. “I wasn’t just seeing and hearing things. I’ve been roofied before, damn it,” she said suddenly, no louder, but with all the intensity her bitter experience could give her exhausted body. “You don’t make shit up, you just black out! I could not have imagined it!”

“Okay, okay. Dial it back, darlin’. Just tell me what happened.”

Ana stopped, breathing hard, trying to think. “I was in the house,” she said at last, grabbing on to the one clear memory she had of that entire day. “I don’t know how I got there. I was just there. My cousin…he had a little Freddy bear…teddy bear,” she corrected herself, clapping a hand over her eyes to shut out the sight of Freddy. “I found it in his room when I was clearing the house and that’s where I left it. It was in his room, only it wasn’t. It was there last night, on the grandfather clock in the hallway. I saw it. I couldn’t…couldn’t think of what that meant. It didn’t have any…any…consequences. I just picked it up and started to take it back to his room. I was on the stairs and I heard someone walking around upstairs. Not the wind. Not the house creaking. It was footsteps. He was in my house. He got there before me. He put the bear on the clock so I’d see it when I came in. He was waiting for me.”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t know.” Ana’s conviction, unquestioned, bled away and left her with nothing but the headache. “I ran, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t remember. Maybe he even got me, I have no fucking clue.”

“You banged up at all?”

Ana pulled her sleeves up one at a time, then had a peek down the front of her shirt, squeezing at her tits and thighs and pussy, testing for hurts and finding none. “I don’t think so. Wicked sunburn. Brutal headache. A little pukey-feeling. That’s about it.”

“Where are you right now?”

Ana glanced at the stage. “Crashing at my friend’s house, apparently.”

“Apparently?”

“I just woke up in the back room. I have no idea when I got here.”

“Mason know where you are?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember driving over. He might have followed me.”

“If he shows up, you think your friend is going to stand between him and you?”

“Yeah,” she said, thinly smiling. “I do, actually. He’s a bear.”

“Bears come in two kinds,” said Rider, unimpressed. “Teddies and grizzlies. Which is he?”

Ana looked at Freddy. Freddy, narrow-eyed, put his top hat on and gave the brim that little gangster-snap that said business.

“A bit of both,” she said. “I’m all right here, Rider. Really. I’m fine.”

“You’re fine. So.” Rider’s chair creaked through the phone as he leaned back and put his boots up on that round table. “So I can handle this one of two ways. I can make a phone call and settle this today, or I can drive up and give it the personal touch, which will take me a little more time. How do you want it?”

Ana sighed, rubbing her eyes. “Don’t. Don’t handle it.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Like you said, I never saw him. I can’t be super-crispy-sugar-frosted-clear or whatever. If you don’t remember something…did it ever really happen? It’s like, you know, trees falling in the forest.”

“Fuck that zen shit in its fat forgiving ass. If he put hands on my pony, I will feed that man to a fucking alligator.”

Ana, sitting at the clawed, cracked feet of Swampwick Q. Fuckworthy III, tried to imagine him crawling through the pizzeria’s halls after dark, eyes lit up and snaggletoothed jaws shiny with fresh blood, and found it disturbingly easy, so much that her sunburned skin prickled up in painful gooseflesh. She looked away, but could not quite drive the image fully from her mind and it made her damned nervous to now have him towering behind her. Summoning all her strength, she scooted away to put her back to another wall where she could keep both eyes on Swampy.

“Mason’s an idiot, but he’s not stupid,” she said. “If he did something, he’ll be expecting retaliation. If he didn’t, you’ll be giving him an excuse to go to war and unless your opening shot goes directly in his head, you can expect him to do his best to seize control of your operation.”

“He ain’t gonna haul his sorry ass all the way out here to start shit he can’t possibly—”

“Of course he will!” Ana interrupted, even though interrupting Rider was not something she did, as a rule. “And he won’t be alone. You’ll be dealing with wave after wave of his meth-head minions and that shit will be visible because there is not one pony in Mason’s stable who didn’t learn how to thug by watching rap videos, and every one of them is hungry to prove they are not the absolute goddamn posers they are to the one guy who isn’t.”

“You were supposed to walk away if he gave you the heebies, pony.”

“Yeah, well.” Ana bared her teeth at the phone and then sighed. “Mason Kellar is the kind of well you have to fall into before you realize just how deep it is.”

“If this is your way of convincing me not to get involved, you are failing on an epic scale.”

“It’s not worth it.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. This ain’t even hardly about you, it’s about him insulting me.”

“If that’s what he did, he did it to provoke you, which can only mean he had a reason to think your reaction, _this_ reaction, played to his advantage. If it’s not what he did, you’re giving him every reason in the world to think you’re provoking him. Either way, it’ll end with him and his whole crew on your doorstep by the end of the day. The best possible outcome of that shitstorm is you burying three dozen bodies! Goddamn it, Rider!” she snapped and had to grab at her head to hold it on. “I am in no condition to be this fucking rational! It’s not worth it. That’s all I should have to say and it’s so fucking self-evident, I resent having to say it at all, much less for the second time!”

“Okay, okay. Calm your tits. Let me think.”

Ana sagged against the wall in silence. Onstage, Bonnie strummed his stringless guitar and Chica twiddled her fingers in the air where her keyboard used to be, playing the suspense-building ragtime jam that went along with Freddy’s magic act, even though he had glitched out and wasn’t doing it anymore. It was hard to watch them pantomiming their old act in this decrepit setting, hearing wheezing pneumatics and grinding gears instead of music and chatter and the blips and bells of the arcade. Why did she keep coming back here? It was never going to stop hurting.

“Okay,” said Rider, waking her out of an open-eyed, unhappy doze. “You’re right. This ain’t the time. I’m going to put this aside for now…just for now. In the meantime, there’s you.”

“What about me?”

“For one, you’re all done with Mason. I mean done. He calls you up and wants more work at the house, you tell him you are otherwise engaged. I don’t care what he tells you—you used the wrong wallpaper, the tub fell through the ceiling, you left your bandsaw behind—what the fuck ever, you are done. And not only do you tell him any further questions are to be directed to me, you hang up the phone and call me to let me know that call should be incoming. If that man so much as waves at you on the street, you call me. No, strike that. You so much as see that man or any of his crew—”

“Rider, this town is, like, two miles across at its widest point, with maybe two thousand people sharing one grocery store, one gas station and one road out of town. We are going to meet.”

“All right, but if he talks to you, even to wish you a Merry Christmas—”

“If I’m still in this shithole in December, he’s welcome to kill me.”

“You interrupt me one more fucking time—”

“Sorry. Oh shit, I did it again,” she said, pinching at the bridge of her nose. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Fuck. You know I’d never do this if I didn’t have a live honey badger eating its way out of my fucking head this morning.”

“And on that note.” The sound of Rider shifting and putting his boots back up on the table came through the line, a signal that the worst had come and gone. “When you called yesterday, you said something about your house being inspected soon.”

“Fuck!” Ana groaned, thumping her head carefully back against the wall. “I forgot. I am really out of it right now.”

“You got a date and a time?”

“Yeah, hang on. They sent me a notice.” Ana dragged her pack over, wincing as it scraped across the tiles, and rummaged through the pockets one after the other until she found the folded paper she was after. “Wednesday,” she told him. 

Slam, went his boots on the floor. “Wednesday as in fucking _yesterday_?”

“What?” Ana checked her phone’s date against the paper. “No,” she said, enormously relieved. “Next one. Next week.”

“Jesus. Go on. Wednesday when?”

“I don’t know. Says representatives will be by as their schedule permits, sometime between nine in the morning and six at night.”

“Oh, they are really deep in your ass, aren’t they? All right.” A short silence as Rider presumably did something on his end. “Assuming you pass the inspection, how long will it be before you sell the house?”

“I don’t know. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done before I can list it and…I don’t know. I’m still not sure that’s the way I want to go.”

“You just said you don’t want to live in that town.”

“I don’t.”

“But you don’t want to sell the house and leave?”

“It’s complicated.”

“No, it ain’t. It’s a rundown house in a shithole town where resides the man who maybe slipped you a fucking mickey for purposes we will not get into. You need not to be there and that’s as simple as it gets. It’s time for you to come home.”

“Fuck off, Rider,” she sighed.

“I want you home, Ana.”

She didn’t like it when he used her actual name and he knew it, which was why he did it at times like this.

“Now I ain’t insisting right now, but if you give me one more good reason, just one, and I will. I ain’t had to get tough on you in a long time and maybe you think that means I forgot how, but I assure you, I have not. You hear me?”

Ana thought a number of satisfying things she knew she’d never say. “I hear you.”

“Get your shit together,” he ordered. “Do what you got to do to that house and sell it. Burn a candle for your aunt and your brother—”

“My cousin.”

“Who the fuck ever,” he snapped. “Just do it and come home. Enough is enough already. You’re no good on your own, you never have been, and that place is only making it worse.”

“No good on my own?” she echoed, more amused than offended by this assessment, although it did abrade. She could tell he was getting pissed again and humor was never the way to handle that on Rider, but all the same, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m what you’ve got,” Rider countered, his tone unsoftened. “I’m all you’ve got and if that ain’t a sad statement on your circumstances, I don’t know what is. How much money you got left in that account?”

“Enough,” said Ana neutrally.

“Then start spending it. If I don’t see some serious charges in the next few days, I will send a fucking crew out to flip the fucking thing without you. You hear me?”

“Yes.”

“You need more vitamins?”

“No.”

“You sleeping?”

“Occasionally.”

“Eating?”

“Jesus Christ, Rider.”

“Oh, am I being the unreasonable one here? Tell you what, darlin’. You take a picture of yourself right now and send it to me. If I like what I see, I will double the money in that account this minute. If I don’t, you get in your goddamn truck and get your ass back home. Deal?”

Ana scowled and looked away around the room, but her eyes went straight to Freddy and he was looking back at her in that eerily knowing way. She looked at the ceiling instead.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. So don’t you Jesus Christ me. I have been extremely fucking forgiving of you in the past, but my tolerance for your eye-rolling horseshit is right at the red line this morning. You’ve had all the warnings I’m going to give you. Next time I got to tell you to mind your attitude, I’ll be minding it myself and you ain’t going to forget it any time soon. You hear me?”

Freddy grunted.

“What was that?” Rider demanded, not in a what-did-I-just-hear but in a what-the-fuck-did-you-just-say-to-me tone.

“I said yeah,” said Ana, eyeing Freddy.

“Goddamn right you did.”

Silence fell between them. Ana’s head hammered out each swollen second.

“You there?” he asked at last.

“Yeah.”

“You mad?”

“No.”

“Good. Because I am,” he said with a sharp-edged sort of laugh, “and I try like hell not to let that happen with you. You and me, we’re well beyond keeping score, but if we did, you’ve earned a certain amount of forgiveness. You always been one of my best. I would hate like hell to have to get tough on you. You know that.”

“I know.”

“Now, I ain’t your daddy and I won’t insist you check in with me every night, but given the seriousness of your present circumstances, I know you’ll agree that an open line of communication between us is a smart thing to have. You keep me informed, I’ll let you keep your distance. You don’t, I won’t. Got it?”

“I got it.”

“All right,” he said in his it’s-settled tone, which, if not all the way back to normal, was at least an improvement. “Go back to sleep, darlin’. Shoot me a text when you wake up and I’ll get my guy in touch with you. Or don’t shoot me a text when you wake up and we’ll have our next little chat in person.”

He hung up as he always did, without goodbyes. Ana shut her phone all the way off, conserving what little life remained in the battery until such time as she felt like going out and sitting in the truck while it charged.

Sleep, he said, and she was tired all the way down to her blood and bones, but she didn’t move. Dust motes drifted through the hazy light that had, against all odds, penetrated this deep into the building. Ana watched them for a while, then looked through them to find Freddy still center stage and still doing nothing. He hadn’t shut down and put himself into sleep-mode or gotten stuck on one of the trickier gestures that made up his magic act. His back was straight, his shoulders squared, and he was looking right at her. No, he hadn’t glitched out in the middle of his performance. He’d stopped the routine to listen in on her call and now that it was over, he was thinking about what he’d heard.

Ana ran the more relevant parts of the conversation through her aching head and decided that even if she wasn’t the worst person in the world, she was quite possibly the worst ever to bring her business into the dining room of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria and as master of that domain, he had every right to want to keep the riff-raff out. And that was what he saw when he looked at her, she knew. Hell, that was what she was.

“I used to hear people say things like, ‘He would never do something like that,’ and think it meant something,” she said suddenly.

Freddy’s short, round ears twitched and rotated, aiming themselves at her.

“You hear it all the time, you know? ‘She would never in a million years do something so horrible,’ or ‘It’s just not in his nature.’ But that’s not how it works, is it? We don’t do things because we are who we are,” said Ana, studying Freddy’s ears and all their minute movements as he listened. “We turn into the person who can do the things we do. And one day, you just look up and realize…it’s me. I’m the monster.”

She looked at Freddy. He looked at her.

“How did I let that happen?” she asked him.

His head tipped slightly forward, making him seem to frown. His eyes shifted away from her to the microphone in his hand.

Behind him, Chica and Bonnie stopped playing. Chica clapped her hands and Bonnie stuttered out a, “TH-TH-THAT WAS AWESOME!” as Freddy’s abandoned magic act came to its scheduled end. Freddy glanced back at them, then stepped aside just before Bonnie moved into center stage position, waving one hand and saying, “SURE, I’D LOVE TO! ANY REQUESTS?”

“Mia Rose’s _If You’ll Be My Man,_ ” Ana suggested wryly.

Bonnie’s ears snapped all the way forward, wobbling on their pins, then folded over in a relaxed, attentive position, his fingers already moving. “THAT’S MY F-F-FAVORITE SONG!” he said, as he no doubt always said. “SING ALONG IF YOU KNOW THE WORDS!”

Ana sighed and rolled onto her hip, preparatory to heaving herself onto her feet because, much as she loved him, she could not sit here and listen to _Over in the Meadow_ or _The Wheels on the Bus_ or, God help her, _Chica’s Pizza Song_ , not today. She made it as far as planting one foot on the tiles and one hand on the wall when Bonnie’s singing voice broke across her headache.

“ _It’s a bad, bad world we live in and no one to be a friend…_ ”

She looked at him and found him staring right at her. His fingers moved on the broken guitar in what sure seemed to be the same movements Mia Rose used in her video of this song and if he didn’t hit every note exactly the way she did, he hit them just fine. He sang it better than Ana herself did, that was for damned sure.

“ _There ain’t no hope. There ain’t no God. There ain’t no heaven at the end. Just a sad, sad world that swallows us, but just you take my hand, and if you’ll be my baby girl tonight, I can be your man._ ”

Ana got up and walked to the stage as Bonnie sang that song he couldn’t have heard anywhere but from her, a song so inappropriate to the venue that she couldn’t quite believe she was hearing it even when every note was stabbing her through eyes and twisting on its way to the back of her skull. The echoes in this empty room were murderous, but still she went to him, pulled to him, trapped by disbelief as much as fascination. 

“ _Oh, I’ve never been more honest than when I told you lies,_ ” Bonnie sang. Under Freddy’s narrow stare, he took one shuddering step forward and dropped heavily to one knee—his bad one—catching and holding her in his bright green eyes and lowering his voice until the song was just for her. “ _…And I never knew how dead I was ‘til your touch brought me to life._ ”

“I’m still leaving in the morning,” said Ana, because she couldn’t sing it, not in this condition.

He let her say it alone, chiming in on the next bar with, “ _And you’re leaving me behind. But before you go, I’ll hold you close and make believe you’re mine._ ”

Ana had heard the expression ‘a chill went up his spine’ and thought she understood it, but it was not until that moment, when the icy point of that intangible scythe dug in at the small of her back and pulled itself up, unzipping her like a doll and exposing all her wiring to the dead air of this place that she really knew what a chilling thought was, because there was no fucking way he could have done that. Even if he were programmed to add songs to his repertoire on his own and even if he had enough speech comprehension to reverse the gender where appropriate, he could not, could _never_ , improvise a duet.

“You’re not the man I’m looking for,” she said numbly and he did it again:

“ _But I’m the lover that you need. And I can give you what you want if you’ll j-j-just trust-t-t me._ ”

That wasn’t even close to the real lyric.

‘That’s why he stuttered,’ thought Ana and that chill sliced up her spine again, deeper and colder.

“This ain’t love we’re making,” she said. “It’s just shadows in the dark.”

“ _But I promise you, before this night is through, I can write my name on your heart._ ”

There was an instrumental bridge here and Bonnie played the hell out of it on some other plane of being, but in the absence of his voice, Ana found herself free to back away and she did. Bonnie’s fingers kept playing, but his eyes shifted to watch her as she quickly recovered her pack and headed for the East Hall again. She did not run. She walked and if it was a fast walk, so what? Her head hurt. She wanted to get out of there and back into the muffling dark of the quiet room before the instrumental ended. That was all. Maybe when she woke up, she would be capable of dealing with the creeping paranoia that she knew damned well was nothing but a by-product of the epic pill-popping spree she’d been on these past few weeks, but still made her see feeling, thought, and above all, life in the animatronics’ plastic eyes.

# * * *

The quiet room must have been restful once, the perfect place to withdraw from the noise and excitement of Freddy’s. It was not large, but the tall ceiling and once-bright colors had kept it from feeling too claustrophobic. The padded walls and floor had been plush, before time and decay and seeping moisture had given it that corpseflesh look and feel. Dangling wires and discolored ceiling tiles marked the place where there had been a light and fan, but now the air was still, heavy as a rotting blanket, difficult to breathe. Closet air, Ana thought, familiar and safe. She made the cleanest piece of floor her bed, but each time she woke, she stretched her cramping limbs and rolled over and so she was against the farthest wall, curled small and all but kissing the mildewed padding, when Freddy’s hand came out of nothing and shook her roughly awake.

Her head still throbbed, but without the languid confusion that had overlaid it before. All the same, she could not fit her waking self into her skull and saw no reason to try. 

“Nnugh,” she said, pushing at his forearm. Her fingers plowed up furrows of rotten flocking, but did not budge him an inch. As soon as he released her, she rolled over and curled herself into a tighter, more invisible ball.

“COME ON, KIDS. TIME TO P-P-P—TIME TO S-S-S—TIME TO TIME TO TIME.” He clicked himself quiet, pacing back and forth in the middle of the room, then came back to her and reached down again to shake her. “COME ON, KIDS! LET’S GO! IT’S TIME TO PARTY!”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Ana muttered, shading her eyes from the blazing light of his.

“NO, IT’S NOT.”

“I’m sleeping.”

“NO, YOU’RE NOT.”

“I was. Go away.”

“NO.”

“I can’t deal with you this fucking early,” she muttered, rubbing at her face and wincing at the sting of sunburn she kept forgetting was there. She could still recall, as if from a dream, the paranoid fantasy that had gripped her heart when she’d heard Bonnie start singing _If You’ll Be My Man_ , how certain she’d been that he could not make it into a duet just because she’d joined in. Like no kid ever in the history of Freddy’s had ever sung along with him. They were adaptable. More than she was, obviously. She, who treated them like people and got depressed when they acted like machines; she, who treated them like machines and got freaked out when they acted like people.

“LET’S GO, KIDS,” Freddy said, forcing the derailed train of her thoughts back on track. He reached for her again, only to straighten up when she gave him an irritated smack and mimic the frustration that had to be showing on her face right back down at her. “I’M GOING TO COUNT TO THREE,” he said.

“Oh God, really? Okay, give me a second here. Um…I need a nap.”

“IT’S OVER.”

“I need a time-out.”

He snorted agreement, but said, “LET’S GO, KIDS.” 

“I need to fucking detox here, all right? Fuck off already!”

He stepped back, paced left and right behind her, then bent over and wedged both huge hands into the tiny cavities of her underarms. He scooped her up like a sleeping cat and set her on her feet, once, twice, and a final third time before her legs would take her. “LET’S GO, KIDS,” he said again. “HAVE A SLICE OF WORLD-FAMOUS FAZBEAR PIZZA. HAVE A COLD, REFRESHING SODA. HAVE A HAVE A HAVE A GREAT TIME AT FREDDY FAZBEAR’S PIZZERIA! COME ON, KIDS. TIME TO P-P-PARTY.” He clicked some more, his mechanisms whining and scraping beneath his head, and then said, “TIME. TO. GET. UP.”

“I know the restaurant’s closed. Just let me sleep a few more hours.” She started to lower herself back to the floor. “I’ll go home when I wake up, okay?”

“NO. GET. UP,” he ordered, frowning. “I WANT. YOU. ON. YOUR. FEET.”

“How’s it feel to want, big bear?” Ana rolled over and snuggled close to the wall.

Freddy grabbed her arm and hauled her upright again. “IT’S TIME TO P-P-P-P—TIME TO—HAVE A COLD, REFRESHING SODA. LET’S GO!”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I. DON’T. CARE. AN-N-A.” Her name caught in his throat like a bone. He tried again, not saying it as much as spelling it and running the letters together into something that was almost her name: “AN-N-A. DON’T FIGHT. GET. UP. AND. LET’S GO. NOW.” 

He turned around and headed for the door. She followed him until he was out in the hall, then nudged the heavy door shut and went back to her sleeping corner. 

She had only just gotten to one knee when the door wheezed open and thumped into the padded wall about as hard as it could. Just the fact that he could knock the thing into the wall on those rusty hinges would have been impressive under other circumstances. Without a word, he scrape-thumped his way across the small room as she whined at him to just leave her alone for one more hour, a half-hour, ten minutes, five, and picked her up again. He did not stand her up this time, but flung her like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder and just walked out again.

“Put me down!” she moaned.

“NO.”

“I mean it!”

“SO. DO. I.”

She kicked weakly. Just what she thought that was going to accomplish, she had no idea—tipped over his back like this, if she had struggled free, she’d have only gone over on her head on the floor—but Freddy was having none of her shit. She kicked; he caught her by the ankles and pinned them together in one huge fist. She furthered her stupidity by slapping at his back; he reciprocated, not quite in the same place and not very hard, but with enough of a sting to clarify her fuzzy thoughts and convince her she did not want to get into a slap-fight with either a robot or a bear and certainly not with both in the same body. Defeated, she slumped, swaying with his lurching, uneven strides, as he carried her down the hall and into the dining room.

It was not yet night, which surprised her. Her sleep had been broken into so many fragments of blackness, headache and hell that she just assumed she’d slept the whole day away. But there were unhealthy beams of light hanging in the air and Bonnie and Chica were still on stage, singing about soap and all the times it was most important to wash your hands and face. So it was definitely morning. The only question was, was it still today or was it tomorrow already?

God, if she’d slept through the damn night, Rider was going to flip his shit.

“Put me down,” ordered Ana, pushing herself as upright as she could manage, hanging down Freddy’s back. “I’m awake, I’m awake! Put me down, damn it!”

Freddy shrugged her off his shoulder and set her with a knee-jarring thump on her feet, but at her first step, he caught her arm and turned her bodily around, aiming her at the stage and pointing for good measure. Not at Chica and Bonnie, but at the half-gone case of water pushed up against the wall. He grunted.

“Yeah, I see it,” she said irritably. “I’ll take care of it. Just give me a minute.” She tried again to go around him and again, he caught her, turned her, and this time, gave her a nudge toward the stage. “Fine! God damn, Freddy!” Ana stomped over, grabbed the case and heaved it off his precious stage onto the floor next to the stairs where, admittedly, it was not so much an obstacle for the worn-out animatronics to get around. “Happy?”

Freddy clapped a hand over the end of his muzzle and stared at her through his splayed fingers for a moment, but reached out quick enough to grab her before she could get around him. Towing her behind him, he limped over and pulled a bottle out of the case. He took Ana’s wrist, slapped the water into her palm, and pointed one blunt finger directly into her face. “HAVE A COLD, REFRESHING SODA,” he growled.

“Stop telling me what to do.”

“DON’T FIGHT.”

“I’m not fighting.”

“THEN. SIT DOWN.”

“I need my phone, damn it! Move!”

Freddy put both hands on her shoulders as she tried to get past him and seated her with a shove on the stage steps. He clicked, glaring, then suddenly, cheerfully said, “I’VE GOT A RIDDLE FOR YOU, KIDS.”

“What? Riddle?” Ana blinked, peering up at him, but the view did not change. “Okay?”

“WHERE DOES A FIVE-HUNDRED POUND BEAR SIT AT THE MOVIES?”

That was an old one. Ana sighed and said, “Anywhere he wants.”

He leaned over, filling her entire vision with his broad smile and flashing eyes. “ANYWHERE HE WANTS,” he agreed as the Toreador March began to play. “I’M FREDDY FAZBEAR. I’M THE LEADER OF THE BAND. AND. YOU. ARE. A. GUEST. IN. MY. HOME.” 

“Yeah, well, a good host would let a girl get her goddamn phone when she needs to make a call, so back up off me, big bear.”

Freddy grunted, straightening. He looked behind him, his eyes still lit, scanning the room until he saw her day pack lying at Swampy’s feet. “DRINK,” he told her and turned away.

Ana broke the seal on her bottle’s cap, but didn’t open it. She watched the floor between her boots, listening to the scrape and thud of Freddy’s footsteps until his matted, mildewed feet shuffled into view in front of her. Her pack dropped between them.

Ana pulled it closer and found her phone, but the battery was stone-dead. “Shit.”

“YOU’RE WELCOME.” Freddy tapped one finger on the neck of her water bottle. “DRINK.”

She tried, but the taste of overheated plastic, generic tapwater and her own chapped mouth sure didn’t make the job of keeping it down any easier. Ana took two lingering sips under Freddy’s close stare, then opened her pack again and dug down through her supply pocket for the little tube of flavor powders she kept in it. Citrus Sunrise. Orange-colored chemicals with caffeine additives. Yum. 

Freddy watched as she shook it all up and when she had another sip of the doctored drink, he bent over and stuck a paw in her pack himself.

“Get out of that,” said Ana.

He grunted and kept pawing.

“Seriously, there’s nothing in there but, like, ketchup and condoms. What an enchanted life I lead,” she added under her breath and drank more water. “Freddy, I said get out.”

“I. HEARD. YOU.”

“Then get your goddamn hands out of my pack.”

“NO.”

“How tall did you say you were?” she asked caustically.

“SIX FEET, TEN INCHES,” he replied without looking up. “HOW. TALL. ARE. YOU.”

She watched him take out one of her vitamin bottles—her Adderall—inspect the label—Ginseng—and put it back, all without paying her the slightest attention. “Five-eight,” she said at last.

He grunted, still moving shit around in her pack. “YOU. ARE. THE. BIGGEST. BABY. I’VE. EVER. MET.”

“Funny.”

“IT’S. NOT. A. JOKE.” He clicked and said, “I TOOK THE SHELL OFF MY RACING SNAIL, THINKING IT WOULD MAKE HIM FASTER, BUT IF ANYTHING, IT ONLY MADE HIM MORE SLUGGISH.” He clicked again. “THAT. WAS. A. JOKE.” 

“If you say so. The first one was funnier.”

“EVERYONE’S A CRITIC.” Freddy emerged from Ana’s pack as the musical part of the act came to a close and Bonnie began to enthusiastically tell Chica all about the latest adventures of his comic book hero, Superbunny. Freddy had a box of crackers. He shook it—nearly full—and looked at her.

“You got me,” sighed Ana. “No outside food or drink in the restaurant. But in my defense, you’re not supposed to rifle through other people’s shit either.”

Freddy grunted and held the box out. 

Ana took it and put it on the floor beside her.

Freddy bent and picked it up again, shoving it practically in her face. “EAT,” he ordered.

“Gross,” she said, pushing the crackers away. “I bought those on my way up from California. They were nasty when I got them and I’m guessing they have not improved in the last three months.”

He looked at the box, scowling, then tossed it behind him and resumed rummaging through her bag. He came up with a Snickers bar and thrust it at her insistently.

She looked at it and then at him. “I’m not eating that.”

He growled, eyelids slanting down ominously. 

She poked the candy bar. The impression of her finger stayed. “That,” she said as Freddy cocked his head and frowned at the crater in the middle of the wrapper, “is Snickers soup. Look, everything in that pack is either melted or a million years old and right now, I could not care less about eating, so leave me alone. Okay? Okay. I’ll be out of your hair just as soon as I get my head together.”

Behind her, Bonnie’s easy-going drawl began to break apart.

“BE CALM,” said Freddy, still glaring down at Ana. “DON’T FIGHT.”

“—AND LEAP-P T-T-TALL BUILDING-ING-INGS—”

“BIG DEAL,” sniffed Chica. “SO CAN I.”

“—IN A SING-ING-GLE BOUND-D-D.”

“DON’T FIGHT,” Freddy said again, glancing toward the stage as his frown deepened. “BONNIE. LOOK AT ME. OPEN YOUR EYES.”

Bonnie’s head jerked around. His body followed, shuddering. He looked at Freddy, but continued his back-and-forth with Chica. “YOU C-C-CAN J-J-JUMP—”

“OF COURSE, SILLY. BUILDINGS CAN’T JUMP.”

“—HIGHER TH-THAN A B-B-BUILDING?”

“DON’T FIGHT,” Freddy repeated. “IT’S ALL RIGHT.” He looked back down at Ana, then at her day pack, resting between her feet.

Before she could even think to stop him, Freddy bent and picked it up. He reseated her with an easy, almost casual shove when she jumped up, and then pointed at her as he looked back at Bonnie. “WATCH CLOSELY, KIDS,” he said. And to Ana, he added, “DRINK.”

Ana scrambled to her feet again, grabbing for her pack as he held it over his head and well, well out of her reach. There was nothing she could do except smack him in his big stupid bear face and shout, “Give me my fucking shit back!” which so exhausted her that she didn’t have the breath to call him an asshole on top of it.

“RULE NUMBER TWO,” he replied cheerfully. “DON’T YELL. RULE NUMBER SEVEN. DON’T HIT. RULE NUMBER SIX. DON’T TOUCH FREDDY. THE RULES ARE FOR YOUR SAFETY.” His head turned to track her as she circled him, a full 360 degrees, and when she came back around to his front-side, he said, “OUTSIDE FOOD OR DRINK ISN’T ALLOWED IN THE RESTAURANT. NO BACKPACKS OR OTHER BAGS ALLOWED. SORRY, I’LL HAVE TO TAKE THIS. YOU CAN PICK IT UP AT THE SECURITY OFFICE WHEN YOU’RE READY TO LEAVE.”

“Then I’m leaving! Give it the fuck back!”

“UH OH! SOUNDS LIKE SOMEONE NEEDS A TIME-OUT!” Suddenly, Freddy’s face was right in front of hers, all eyes and teeth. “SIT DOWN. WHILE. YOU. STILL. CAN.”

“HE WEARS HIS UNDERWEAR ON THE OUTSIDE OF HIS CLOTHES,” sniffed Chica in confusing tandem with Bonnie’s, “HE’S S-ST-STRONG, HE-HE-HE’S B-B-B-BRAVE, HE-E- _EEEEEE_ ALWAYS EATS HIS C-C-CARROTS—”

Ana stood, weaving on her feet for a moment longer, and finally sat. 

“MIND YOUR MANNERS,” Freddy told her. Slinging the strap of her goddamn pack over his shoulder, he limped off down the hall.

Ana glanced behind her at Bonnie and Chica, who were winding down their act. Bonnie was still glitching out, not as bad as he had the last time she’d seen his act, but enough that Chica’s punchlines were coming well before his cues. ‘My fault,’ she thought, even though she knew it wasn’t. He’d been breaking down for years before she’d come along. All the same, she gathered her strength and heaved herself onto her feet.

Bonnie’s glitching got so much worse when she pushed open the West Hall door that she stopped and went back to the stage.

“I’m not leaving,” she told him as he jerked toward Chica and jittered out the knock-knock part of a joke she had already finished. “I just need to make a phone call, so I have to go charge the battery. Okay? I’ll be right back.”

Bonnie hyucked at something Chica had said more than a minute ago while Chica clapped her hands in enthusiastic agreement at something Bonnie hadn’t said yet. Neither one of them paid Ana the slightest bit of attention.

“I’ll be right back,” said Ana again and left.

The West Hall was several miles long this morning, but she bent her head and trudged along anyway. The parking lot was even longer, as well as hotter and brighter. The sun was still high in the sky and Ana’s shadow still fell before her as she made her laborious way to the treeline, forcing her to move her estimate of the time back even further. Not only had Freddy not allowed her to sleep all day, he probably hadn’t let her sleep more than an hour. Big jerk. And she couldn’t even say anything about it, because he’d only remind her the restaurant was closed six or seven thousand times, and tell her good boys and girls didn’t trespass.

Come to think of it, why didn’t he do that last night?

Maybe he had and she’d just slept through it. She doubted the animatronics were programmed to pick people up and throw them out into the parking lot, even if they did break in after dark.

But by the same token, they wouldn’t be programmed to pick them up and carry them into the dining room for a cold, refreshing soda and a slice of pizza either and Freddy had sure done that. In fact, Ana was reasonably certain that lugging guests around in a fireman carry and giving them a smack on the ass when they struggled had to be a major no-no. Then again, when it came to the rules, Freddy was good at quoting them, not so great at following them.

Reaching the treeline at last, Ana found the thickest cover and hunkered down to pee, but after hanging her bare ass out into the great wide open for a minute or two with no payoff, she zipped herself up again. Before she made the long hike back to the building, she went to her truck and crawled into the back where it was somewhat darker if stuffier, and where the direct sunlight could not touch her tender skin. As she rested, she drank, holding the water in her mouth before swallowing. She imagined she could feel her tissues opening up, soaking the moisture in, so that when she did finally swallow, it seemed a much smaller mouthful than what she’d started with. Idly, she pinched the back of her hand and counted the seconds it took for her parched skin to slide back into position. One was too many and it was a lot more than one. 

She’d been dehydrated before, but dehydration was a horse of a whole different color in this part of the world. It wasn’t just the heat or the dry desert air, but the salts in the soil and the wind that dried the sweat as it formed so that you were never aware of the moisture you were losing. Add to that the enormous workload she’d been under lately—not to mention the drugs—and she’d probably been what anyone else would consider dangerously dehydrated for days. She needed to be careful, take little sips and space them out, because if she gave herself the pukes, there was a pretty goddamn good chance she’d die. She was too tired and wrung out to feel any one way or the other about that, but she did acknowledge it in an academic sense, even if she would never in a thousand years admit it to anyone else.

Like Rider. Mister ‘You’re no good on your own’. Ought to put him and Freddy in the same room so they could compare notes on all the ways she failed to live up to their expectations.

God, she was so tired. The temptation to close her eyes was strong, but she couldn’t do it. Not here. It might not be as hot today as it had been, but the back of the truck might as well be an oven. She’d be basting in her own sweat if she had any to give up. And although the air was marginally thinner out here than in the quiet room, it wasn’t a hell of a lot cleaner. The wind was coming in off the quarry, coating her throat on every inhale until it was more a taste than a smell. She ought to go back inside.

The thought that what she really ought to do was go to a hospital or even go to Gallifrey’s or some other place in town with air conditioning or, hell, just go home did not occur to her. She could not remember coming here, but whatever her reasons were, she’d done it. She was here and now Freddy had her pack (and in it, her wallet) and until he decided she could have it back, she was stuck. And until she slept off this headache, she had no desire to drive anywhere.

Ana finished her water and tossed the empty into the corner of the bed. She gave it a little time to settle, then wriggled out and closed up the shell. Shoving her way through the branches of the spiky shrubs and Joshua trees lining the parking lot, she opened the passenger door and climbed inside. She had to slam the door three times before it would close all the way. She wasn’t sure what had happened there, but she wasn’t going to deal with it now.

She’d left the keys in the ignition last night, which made it a less than certain thing that the truck would even start, but it did. Ana reversed carefully along the ledge until she could pull back onto the asphalt, then drove around the parking lot just long enough to convince the A/C to pump out cool air. Then she parked in the shade next to the loading dock, plugged her phone into the charger and set it to sound an alarm in ten minutes.

It seemed she had only closed her eyes when the alarm went off. The battery was not fully charged, but eh, close enough. She checked her messages incuriously; sixty-seven missed calls, which she was willing to bet were all from Rider, the last of them presumably just before she’d spoken to him this morning. 

Ana deleted her messages without bothering to listen to any of them. She fired off a text to let Rider know she was awake for the moment and ready to talk to his guy, then shut off the engine and got out of the truck into the open oven that was Mammon in May. 

She did not think about it in conscious terms, but she so expected to find Bonnie waiting for her in the hall that when she crawled under the boards and saw only Tux, she nearly burst into tears of rejection. She had to take a mental step back and remind herself that dehydrating and detoxing did not make for safe, sane or sensible responses. And then she heard footsteps in the short corridor leading to Pirate Cove. Looking in, she saw Bonnie pacing at the mouth of the Cove as Foxy told the closed curtains the tale of the Sea Witch of Sirenia and damn near burst into tears again, this time tears of relief.

Oh, she was not all right this morning.

“Hey,” she said.

Bonnie swung around, teetered, fell into the wall and went all the way down on his face on the floor. “HI THERE!” he said cheerfully, legs working in walking motions as he tried to push himself up again. “I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT’S YOUR NAME? HI THERE!” He managed a little traction on a patch of floor where most of the tiles had broken, shoved himself back against the wall, and slowly righted himself, chattering away the whole time. “IT’S GREAT TO SEE YOU AGAIN, LITTLE FRIEND! DID YOU ENJOY THE SHOW? ARE YOU HAVING A GOOD SUMMER? IT SURE IS HOT OUT THERE, ISN’T IT? I HOPE YOU’RE KEEPING COOL!"

“OI!” Foxy called waspishly, right in the middle of the good part. “IS ME STORY INTERRUPTING YER CONVERSATION? TAKE IT OUTSIDE, JABBERJAWS!”

Bonnie turned in that direction, his ears dropping flat, but stopped at the mouth of the Cove again and went no further. His hands opened and closed a few times as he stood there in the dark, twitching and clicking to himself.

“THE SEA WITCH NOW, SHE WEREN’T WHAT YE THINK OF WHEN YE THINKS OF A WITCH. AYE, HER SKIN WERE GREEN, BUT IT WERE A COMELY SHADE O’ GREEN, AND HER HAIR WERE WHITE AND SOFT AS FOAM,” Foxy continued. “SHE BROUGHT ME INTO HER CORAL CASTLE AND ASKED ME WHAT I’D HAVE OF HER AND, COO, I HAD TO THINK ABOUT IT SOME.”

Shaking his head, Bonnie turned his back on Pirate Cove and looked at Ana again. His ears came up. His hands, drawn into fists, opened. “HI,” he said, then clicked some more before saying it again. “HI.”

“Hi.” Ana glanced into Pirate Cove, then nodded toward the dim streams of light coming through the boards in the outer hall. “Come on.”

“OKAY.”

They left Foxy recounting the Sea Witch’s riddles to an empty amphitheater and headed back into the West Hall, where, as Bonnie was going happily on about summer and playing in the sun and how nothing beat the heat like cool jams and hanging with your friends, Ana said, “Can we stop? Just for a second.”

“SURE.” Bonnie’s eyes shifted to the door, then to her, then back to the door. He stepped around her and in front of it, as if he thought she’d duck out and sprint away if he gave her half a chance. “WHAT’S UP?”

“The ceiling, silly,” Ana said, leaning up against the wall next to Tux and rubbing her aching, spinning, swollen head. “I thought everyone knew that.”

He twitched, clapped a hand to his face the same way he did when it was Chica delivering that line, and hyucked out the same laugh. His ears jittered, too low, then snapped up, rotated on their pins and folded forward. He said, “I MISSED YOU.”

It startled her. Or something. ‘Startle’ maybe wasn’t the right word, but it was a rush of some kind of confused emotion, there and gone too fast for her to really identify, but leaving behind a stain that was weirdly fearful. She said, “You miss everyone, don’t you?”

He clicked to himself a few times, but that obviously wasn’t a trigger he knew how to respond to, so he started over. “I MISSED YOU.”

“Yeah.” Ana reached up to stroke his cracked face, made smooth by layers of shellac. “I missed you too.”

He knew what to say to that one: “LET’S BE FRIENDS.”

“Ouch.” She winced. “Friendzoned.”

“HUH?”

“Is that what you want? To be friends?”

His ears twitched again. His eyes shifted left to right, as if reading from a list of possible answers. He clicked inside. “NO.”

“What do you want?” 

He thought, the shivering of his ears and intermittent twitches at his joints making him seem anxious. One arm half-rose in what she thought was a shrug until he did it again, with both arms this time.

“Sure,” said Ana, like he’d asked. “Hugs are always on the menu at Freddy’s.”

She stepped into his arms. He closed them around her. His chest was hot and his matted fur and brittle flocking either reeked or itched or both. She rested her sunburnt cheek against his shoulder and closed her eyes, dozing in his embrace.

It was a long hug, but he didn’t break it. One hand, the one with metal fingers, played with her braid for a while before settling on her back. After that he was still, except for the tremors that occasionally passed through him.

It was nice. Ana had never been a huggy sort of person. She didn’t particularly like to be touched even when it was fucking, which at least felt good. The non-fucking sort of touching had always struck her as extra-uncomfortable and even a little annoying. Hypocritical. Deceptive. No one wanted to touch her damn arms or her back or her face. ‘Just get in there and touch what you really want to touch,’ she would think every time, a smile frozen on her face and her body stiff beneath those pointless hands. ‘Just do it if you’re going to do it and if you’re not, let me go home.’

But this was nice. Weird, but nice.

‘But really weird,’ she thought and stepped back.

He let her go, but the twitching, which had calmed while he hugged her, kicked in again with a violence that made his looser joints rattle. She took his hand, the one with the jiggly pinkie, then touched his ear, then leaned in on impulse and pressed her lips to his lower jaw.

The quiet poured into him like milk into a pitcher, filling him from the bottom up. When it reached his head, she broke the kiss and smiled at him. “Better?”

His eyelids dropped on an outward slant, giving him an unhappy expression. “DON’T GO YET,” he said in his aw-shucks voice. “THE SHOW’S JUST STARTING. PLEASE D-D-DON’T PLEASE ST-ST-STAY AND PLAY. THE SHOW’S JUST STARTING-ING-ING. IT’S TIME TO TIME TO TIME TIME TIME TO ROCK. PLEASE.”

“That’s not a goodbye kiss,” she told him. “You couldn’t tell?”

He twitched. The cameras in his eyes whined.

“Here.” She smiled, leaning closer. “Close your eyes.”

He jerked back, his ears slapping the glass of the door behind him as they flattened. “N-N-NO.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Promise. Just close your eyes.”

His ears shivered. He closed his eyes, opened them a sliver, closed them again. He twitched.

“Now. For comparison purposes only,” said Ana, rising up on her tiptoes, “this is a goodbye kiss.”

His ears jittered as she touched her lips to his clammy, unyielding mouth. Otherwise, he did not move or in any way physically react while she kissed him, although she could hear his internal mechanisms revving now and then, without rhythm. “WHERE ARE YOU?” he asked, scraping her lips with the unexpected movement of his muzzle. One shoulder jerked, the fingers of that hand shaking wildly for several seconds before he clenched them into a fist. “HI THERE!”

“I’m right here.” She leaned closer, cautious of her weight, until she was pressed fully against him. “Can you feel me?”

“NO.” He jerked again, his lower jaw clopping her in the chin. “CAN I SEE?”

She gave in, if for no other reason than just to keep him from talking when she was trying to get close. “Just for a little bit.”

He opened his eyes. The cameras irised larger and smaller, trying to focus on her. “WOW,” he said. “OKAY. HI.”

“I needed to get pretty close to do the it’s-nice-to-see-you-again kiss right,” she explained. “I’m not going to knock you over, am I?”

“I’M OKAY.”

“You sure?”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on hers.

Ana again rose up on her toes—he twitched—but drew back with a crooked smile to say, “Are you just going to stand there or are you going to put your arms around me?”

She thought he would close her again in one of those warm, rigid, Bonnie-hugs. Instead, he touched her braid, shivered, and put his hands tentatively on her waist. She could feel hot air pumping out his fingertips and the joints of his wrists, hear the rev and wheeze of his central fan, but he said nothing.

“You ready?” she asked.

He nodded, making an obvious effort to quiet the tremors wracking through him with increasing violence.

“Close your eyes.”

“WHY?”

“Them’s the rules, my man. No kissing with your eyes open.”

He clicked several times, his jaw moving now and then with all the things he could not seem to say, and finally, shivering, closed his eyes.

She leaned close, so much that her lips scraped his on every word, and whispered, “It’s nice to see you again,” just before she pressed her mouth firmly to his.

It unnerved her how much she meant it, the sentiment and the kiss.

He said nothing, did nothing, until she pulled away and said his name. Then his eyes snapped open and focused on her. “IS IT OVER?”

“Do you want it to be over?”

“NO,” he said without hesitation. One of his hands trembled; the other pulled her closer. “I LIKE YOU.”

“There’s a kiss for that, too. Want to try it out?”

“OKAY.”

“Are you my man?” she asked, not feeling even a little bit ridiculous as she gazed into his plastic eyes and the cameras behind them, even though she knew she should.

“I’M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY!”

“But are you my man? We’re getting into the serious stuff now and I don’t kiss just anyone, you know.”

“I’M—I’M—I’M YOUR BEST B-B-BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY!”

She decided to approach from the opposite angle. “Am I your girl?” 

His ears smacked the glass behind him. His head jerked; he reached up with both hands to clamp it and hold it still until the tremors faded. “YOU BET,” he said through a mouthful of rattling plastic as his muzzle and jaw clacked together. He started to laugh—that deep cartoony guffaw—and his hands clenched on his muzzle hard enough to crack through the shellac. “YOU B-B-BET!”

“Easy,” said Ana, reaching up to pull his hands away. He let her push his arms down to his sides, his trembling gradually calming. “Easy, my man. Just relax. You can say it any way you want to say it. I hear you. Am I your girl?”

“I L-L-LOVE TO P-PLAY OUTSIDE WHEN THE WEATHER IS WARM,” he told her.

“Me, too. Close your eyes,” she ordered and, when he obeyed, she cupped the side of his cracked face and kissed him some more.

“I MISSED YOU,” he said again, bumping her away. He clicked, a sound she was coming to associate with searching for a sound-bite, but in the end, he just said the same thing again: “IT’S GREAT TO SEE YOU AGAIN. I MISSED YOU.”

“Okay. Here’s the I-missed-you kiss.” Holding his muzzle steady between her hands, she started at one corner of his broad, bunny mouth and kissed her way across his lower jaw to the other one. “And this one’s the I-really-missed-you,” she breathed, now doing it in reverse along the upper portion of his muzzle. “And this one,” she said, once she’d worked her way back to the middle, just under the smooshed painted hacky-sack of his nose, “doesn’t have a name because it’s just for you and me.”

He opened his eyes, but she didn’t have time to tell him to close them again. The hand on her hip moved suddenly to grip her ass, pulling her off her tiptoes and holding her firmly against him while his other hand cupped the back of her head and, by God, he was kissing her back. Not just standing there, clicking and twitching and generally being an animatronic trying to figure out the correct response to being molested by a customer, but kissing her. His mouth couldn’t move, he had no breath to mingle with hers, no tongue to explore and be explored, but it was still a kiss and there was more feeling in that unfeeling plastic than in all the living flesh she’d ever felt pressed to hers.

She fell into it without thinking, forgetting her weight and his bad leg, and just wrapped her arms around his neck, making out with him as he made out with her and it was hot and messy and everything a hungry kiss should be. The joints of his metal fingers caught in her hair, but those little pains were nothing next just the feel of them clutching at her, mimicking an urgency she knew he couldn’t have. His speakers were silent except for whispery intervals of static, but she could hear his internal fans spinning extra fast, as if he were as breathless as she.

She had never in her life ground on a man like this—pulling at him, pushing at him, unable to bring him close enough even though she could feel his mechanisms vibrating in her own body. Did he know what she was doing? How could he? How could he not? But he didn’t seem to mind and when she pulled herself up and wrapped her legs around his waist, he made a cradle of his hands to steady and support her and never even broke the kiss.

Freddy did.

She never heard the door open and it was a noisy door. She never heard his footsteps and they were heavy steps. Her first and only clue that he was there at all was his booming, “BONNIE!”

Bonnie jerked, a full-body spasm that, in her present frame of mind, struck her as orgasmic rather than startled, and let go of her so suddenly, she had no time to react. He must have realized his mistake almost as soon as he made it, but it was no good. He grabbed empty air as she flailed back, hit Tux, and landed with a ‘Wuff!’ on her butt at his scuffed plastic feet.

“HI, FREDDY!” said Bonnie, static sputtering and popping through his speakers as his shoulders, toes and ears convulsed and rattled. “IT’S NOT-T-T WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE.”

“Yeah, it is,” said Ana, pushing herself up on her elbows.

“WE WERE—WE WERE—WE WERE—”

“Making out,” supplied Ana.

Freddy yanked the door to the dining room open and pointed at it, grunting so hard it was nearly a bark.

Bonnie hesitantly extended a hand toward Ana.

“NOW!” Freddy bellowed and Bonnie went, ears drooping and leg dragging, leaving Ana on the ground. 

“Lighten up, big bear, for crying out loud. It wasn’t his fault.”

Freddy pointed at her with a silencing grunt, then pointed again at the door and held that pose until Bonnie had slunk past and was gone. Glaring, he released the door and let it wheeze asthmatically shut. Only after it latched did he look at her again. The Toreador March began to play as he started for her.

Ana glanced at the side door, in easy escape-range, then sighed and drew up her legs, rested her arms on her knees, and closed her eyes. She waited, listening to Freddy approach. From Pirate Cove she could also hear the muffled sounds of Foxy singing, letting his little mateys know the story is told in gunpowder and gold, for dead men tell no tales. The part of her still coasting along on pills wanted to make a connection there, but she was sober enough to ignore it. She waited, still tasting Bonnie on her lips and smelling him on her skin—neither of these particularly pleasant—and marveling at her herself for that silly glow that poets insisted was in her heart and not, as it in fact was, well below it.

‘This is how the crazy comes out,’ she thought drowsily. Not screaming and slapping, as it had with her mother, and not with hidden hoards, as with her aunt, but with macking on the animal mascots of a pizza parlor. The apple hadn’t fallen far after all. It had just hit some weird branches on the way down.

Freddy reached her, so she guessed she might as well open her eyes, and there he was, looming huge, playing his happy tune and looking like he’d like to set her on fire just to stomp it out. He did not speak, did not click through sound files trying to speak. It was kind of funny, watching him. He didn’t look at all like he was having trouble figuring out what to say; he knew exactly what he wanted to say and he just wasn’t saying it. 

Ana turned her head and watched what she could see of the desert behind the boards of the glass door beside her, ignoring him.

In Pirate Cove, Foxy’s song ended and soon he was sending his audience off with fair winds and following seas. In the hall, there was silence as Freddy and Ana waited one another out.

He spoke first, but he didn’t break. She wasn’t sure what the difference was, just that there was one.

“GET. UP.”

Heaving a sigh, she did, making a point of readjusting her clothes, although they weren’t all that rumpled. She just wanted him to know why they were.

His eyes narrowed. Oh yeah. He knew. And when he opened his mouth, she had no doubt she was going to get a hot little earful about inappropriate physical contact right before he threw her animatronic-groping ass out on the pavement.

“DON’T BLOCK THE EXITS,” he said instead.

It took her aback, which was the nice way of saying it slapped the smug right off her face. She laughed, because she didn’t know what else to do, and said, “Really? That’s what you’re going with?”

“DON’T. PRESS. YOUR. LUCK,” he growled and turned around.

She blushed. She could feel it happening and still couldn’t understand where it was coming from. It had something to do with all those thoughts she could see behind his plastic eyes, but more to do with the easy way in which he just dismissed them—her—and turned away. He wasn’t real. She knew it, even now, but that was almost worse, because if he wasn’t real and he could walk away from her so easily, what did that make her?

“If you’ve got something to say to me, say it!” she snapped. “Don’t fuck with me, asshole, just do it!”

He stopped in his lurching tracks and, with difficulty, turned himself back to her. He looked, impossible as it seemed, even angrier. When he headed for her, in spite of everything, she backed up, bumping into Tux and squeezing herself into the tiny space between him and the wall, but before she could get all the way behind him, Freddy grabbed her by the neck of her shirt.

He yanked her forward just to shove her hard into the wall, and pointed at her, his finger thumping into her breastbone, nailing each word into her heart: “WATCH. YOUR. LANGUAGE.”

_Fuck you._ It screamed through her brain, trembled on her lips, died in her mouth. She said nothing.

“YOU. CAN. CUSS. IN. FRONT. OF. ME,” he was saying. “NOT. AT. ME. MIND YOUR MANNERS! OR. I. WILL. MIND. THEM. FOR. YOU. UNDERSTAND?”

She breathed.

His eyes narrowed. “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

Dropping her gaze, Ana stiffly nodded.

He grunted and released her. “GO. ENJOY THE SHOW! AND DON’T FORGET T-T-TO…HAVE A COLD, REFRESHING SODA.”

_Fuck you. You can’t keep me here. You don’t even want me here. You didn’t care about me then, so don’t pretend you give a damn now._

Freddy glared, staring her down.

Still blushing, silent, Ana went. As she passed the short corridor to Pirate Cove, something made her look, only to see Foxy like a dark ghost at the other end, leaned up against the wall with his arms folded and his eyepatch raised. He didn’t hail her, either as one of his ‘little mateys’ or one of Blackmane’s crew, just nodded to let her know he knew he’d been seen, comfortably off-duty and out of character, enjoying her ignominious retreat.

Ana ducked her head and walked a little faster, but Foxy’s dry chuckle followed her, ringing in her ears long after the actual sound had stopped. She hit the dining room and went straight through, leaving Bonnie’s increasingly broken greetings behind her as she felt her way up the East Hall, past the pig and past the quiet room, to the dogleg that brought her to the security office. There, she fumbled out her phone, but before she could turn on the flashlight app, two eyes lit up.

Freddy was already there, standing in front of the cupboard by the desk with his arms folded. “DID YOU LOSE SOMETHING?” he asked, his hard stare untouched by the sympathy in his voice.

“How did you—” she began, but didn’t finish. It wasn’t the right question anyway. She knew how he’d gotten there ahead of her—going straight across Pirate Cove and through the East Hall from there instead of going all the way around as Ana had done. No, she knew well enough how he’d done it, the real question was, how had he _known_ to?

‘You can’t keep me here,’ she thought again, but didn’t say it. Even in her mind, the last word lifted uneasily, making it more of a question she wasn’t ready to have answered.

Freddy pointed. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

Ana went.


	16. Chapter 16

# CHAPTER SIXTEEN

She sulked in the quiet room for a while, but now that she was awake and her head had somewhat cleared, the overwhelming stench and oppressive stuffiness soon drove her out. The dining room was no cooler, but it at least had a draft that kept the air circulating, which made it tolerable, if not comfortable. She reclaimed her bed of trash bags beneath the solitary table and watched the show, drinking her way steadily through her supply of warm water and wishing she had a burger, a joint, a beer or all three, preferably in an air-conditioned room somewhere far away from here. Between acts, Bonnie would come over and pace around the table where she had caved herself, but she ignored his stuttering invitations to come and play, and eventually he had to go back onstage.

The phone call came in the middle of his rendition of _Everybunny Needs Somebunny_ , as he and Chica stuttered and limped their way through a song and dance act they had once performed as smoothly as Fred and Ginger. Ana answered without even looking to see who it was, her eyes never leaving Bonnie as he lifted Chica, twirled her around and dipped her over his arm. She had never seen anyone dance like that in real life. And she guessed she still hadn’t, this not being exactly as real as reality got, but it was still fascinating to watch. He was struggling, that much was clear, but his struggles only made it more obvious that it had once been easy.

Ana didn’t know how to dance, beyond a little club bump and grind, and that linedancing crap she’d had to learn to work at that soft-core strip club masquerading as a steakhouse. Fuck that job. It had more or less destroyed any youthful interest she’d ever had in the subject of rhythmic ass-shaking, and yet here she was, so absorbed in what was happening on that stage that she could almost feel her own feet moving through the steps. 

These were her thoughts when the phone rang and they continued unabated when she took the call and thumbed it onto the speakers, expecting Rider because who else would it be?

“Hey,” she said, watching Chica clumsily twirl across the stage, guided by Bonnie’s hand on her waist. The flocking there had been worn away to bare plastic, polished to a shine by years of just this touch, that twirl. “What’s up?”

“May I speak to Anastasia Stark please?” said an unfamiliar voice. A man’s voice, the sort that put her in mind of ironed shirts and neckties that might be loosened, but never removed.

“You got her,” she said cautiously as Freddy, who had been watching her watch the show for the better part of a half-hour now, narrowed his eyes and came a little closer. “Who is this?”

“My name is Lem Schumacher. I’ve been retained on your behalf by our mutual friend, Robert Jakobson.”

Ana snorted through her bewilderment. It was always funny to hear Rider’s real name. “Robert,” she said. “So…wait, you’re the lawyer?”

“I am, for the present, your lawyer. Forgive me for taking so long to get back to you,” said the voice. “It’s been a day and a half, as they say. Now, I’ve been given the broad strokes of your situation, but if you don’t mind, I have a number of questions, Miss Stark. Is it Miss Stark? Or would you prefer Anastasia?” 

“Ana is fine,” said Ana, squinting into space as if trying to bring the conversation into a tighter focus. “Um, what sort of questions?”

“Why don’t we start by having you tell me how you acquired the property? And please, Ana, remember that I am your lawyer and everything you say is confidential. If criminal acts need to be concealed, trust me to conceal them. I dare say I’m better at it than you are. So. Tell me everything.”

She did, making the long story as brief and emotionless as possible, too aware of Freddy listening in. Schumacher asked a number of questions, particularly about the fees she’d paid and the contact she’d had with representatives of the city since coming to Mammon. Her brief meeting with the sheriff somehow came out, as did the Title Company lady’s remark about her aunt fucking the devil and burning in hell with demonseed David.

“Excellent,” murmured Schumacher when she reached the rambling end of her tale. “I love it when people do my job for me. But before we get too carried away, a little perspective is in order. I’m told you have a considerable amount of experience in the business of renovating homes. In your professional opinion, and putting all sentiment aside, is the property in question habitable?”

“Yeah, actually, it is. It needs some work, and probably an exterminator, but most of the damage is all, like, cabinets and drywall. The supporting structure is in amazing condition, considering the size of the hoard that was in it. I mean, it’s ugly at the moment, I’m not going to lie, but anyone who knew what they were looking at could easily see it’s not about to fall down.”

“Good. Now. Ana. I am going to ask some very personal questions and it is absolutely imperative that you answer honestly and fully. Are you ready?”

“I guess.”

“Are you presently involved in any illegal activities?”

“I bribed some city officials.”

“Not what I was expecting to hear,” the lawyer commented after a slight pause. “To do what?”

“Give me a burn permit and garbage service,” she said with a shrug. “Not exactly living the thug life, but—”

“But it qualifies,” the lawyer agreed, sounding as if he might be smiling. “I doubt they’ll be terribly eager to incriminate themselves, but thank you for telling me. Anything else?”

“I have some medication I don’t have prescriptions for,” said Ana, eyeing Freddy. “And I smoke a lot of pot.”

Freddy grunted, neither impressed nor surprised.

“Are you growing it?” 

“No.”

“Selling it?”

“No, but no one would ever believe that if they saw my stash,” Ana admitted. “I didn’t know how long I’d be here and I didn’t want the hassle of figuring out how to get more while I was here, so, you know, I packed heavy, but I swear it’s all mine.”

“Mm-hm. Would it all fit in a breadbox?”

“I’ve never actually seen a breadbox, but it all fits in a duffel bag.”

Freddy’s ears cocked. He looked over his shoulder at the East Hall, then narrowly back at her.

“Don’t judge me,” she said.

“I’m not,” the lawyer replied, mistakenly believing the comment directed at him. “Believe me, I’ve heard worse. I’ve seen personal use stashes that couldn’t fit in a bathtub. However, I need to be absolutely clear. Have you accepted or offered drugs of any kind to anyone since your arrival, even to be sociable? If you so much as puffed and passed, I need to know now.”

“No.”

“Good. Don’t. I don’t anticipate much of a fight, but if they put on their warpaint and shake their shields at us, much depends upon your ability to appear photogenic and victimized, and that’s rather difficult to do when the client is too obviously strung-out. To that end, if I asked you to lay off for the rest of the week, you would say…?”

“Sure.”

“Good. Do so. Moving on. Do you drink?”

“Off and on.”

“Been to any raves lately? Gone nightclubbing? Frequented the local bar scene?”

“I don’t think there are any bars in town,” she said with half a smile. “And no, I’ve had a couple beers at home, but nothing at all in public.”

“Are you sexually active at this time?”

“No,” said Ana, thinking of that open can of soda and the great blank space that followed. Her stomach knotted; her gaze wandered back to the stage, where Bonnie pivoted unstably on his bad leg to dip Chica over his arm and rub his nose Eskimo-fashion in the air where her beak would be.

“So no one’s got surveillance footage of you buying an economy case of condoms or Plan B? The manager of the local adult novelty shop doesn’t have your custom-order sex swing on backorder? More to the point, no one can turn up a racy video starring you and the starting lineup of the Mammon Mammoths?”

“Miners,” said Ana with a reluctant grin. “The Mammon Miners, and no.”

“So as far as anyone in that upstanding, God-fearing, witch-burning village knows, you are just as pure as the shores of Eden?”

“Yup.”

“Good. One last question and I should have enough to start on. Are you Mormon?”

“No. I’m not anything. Why?”

“Excellent. That’ll do for now, but just let me be absolutely clear on one thing. If you go home today and find _Get Out Whore of Babylon_ written in human feces on the walls of your house, that’s marvelous and I certainly want to hear about it, but do not, under any circumstances, write it yourself. That sort of thing always comes out, always, and never to the benefit of the author.”

Ana puzzled over that a moment, then said, “You think I’m lying about the shit they’ve given me?”

“No, I don’t and you can’t imagine how refreshing that is. I’m telling you what not to do from this point onward. Just live your life, quietly and non-confrontationally, and wait for Wednesday. Can you do that?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Good. Your homework tonight is to gather up every scrap of paper connected with the property—everything you received from the collection agency, everything the Title office gave you, every receipt for every fee, every citation, every official notice of every official action—and tomorrow, you’re going to fax these to my office.”

“That’s a lot of paper.”

“I’ll buy a parakeet. Can you recommend a hotel in the area?”

“Uh, I think the only hotel in town is the Sugartree and I’ve never been in it, but there’s a few in Hurricane, not too far from here.”

“The Sugartree it is. Sounds charming. Are you available for breakfast Tuesday morning? I’d like the chance to brief you on our strategy of attack before…wait, I suppose I should ask if there is a breakfast available to us first. I’m having a difficult time scouting out the town online. Do they eat in Mammon?”

“Yeah, there’s a diner that does breakfast most days. Gallifrey’s, on Majestic Street.”

“Most days?”

“Not Sunday, obviously.”

“Obviously. Well, what else is there?”

“Nothing,” said Ana and then had to laugh at how taken aback she sounded. “Sorry, but seriously, no. You have to go sixteen miles to the nearest McDonalds and thirty-plus to Denny’s. If you want to wait for lunch, there’s a couple more options, but for breakfast, it’s pretty much Gallifrey’s. I mean, yeah, there’s the Donut Hole a few blocks down, but it’s drive-thru only.” 

“Oh, I have got to see this town. But I can’t wait for lunch. I don’t have enough time as it is. I don’t suppose they’re so Mormon, they don’t have coffee?”

“Sure, they have it. They’ll give you the stink-eye for ordering it, but they have it.”

“Then Gallifrey’s it is. How soon can I expect you?”

“I don’t care. I’m usually up pretty early myself. Seven, I guess. You know, you don’t sound like the kind of lawyer that does property,” she remarked.

“Oh, I’m not,” he said with an indulgent little laugh. “I’m the kind that ruins lives. I’ll see you then. I’ll be the Jew in a blue tie.”

“Better make it a red one,” she said, amused. “There’s a lot of blue ties in this town.”

“Red it is. Gallifrey’s, Tuesday, seven o’clock. Please don’t forget and don’t be late.”

“Don’t you want to know what I look like?”

“I imagine you look like the sort of person a town like Mammon doesn’t want in it. Why? Am I going to have trouble picking you out of the local crowd?”

Ana glanced at her tattooed arm. “No.”

He signed off, like Rider, without goodbyes.

Ana put her phone aside, rubbed her eyes, then crawled out from under the table and went to get another bottle of water. The phone started ringing again before she even got there. Rider, she thought with a small eye-roll, making sure she’d talked to the lawyer. She considered ignoring it, letting him know he was neither her parole officer nor her mother and she was not answerable to him, but her resolve cracked after the second ring and she ended up jogging back across the room to answer. This was more exertion than her body was willing to endure, so that the terse I’m-fine tone she tried to affect came out instead as a breathless, “Yeah?”

“It’s about goddamn time. You been screening my fucking calls? You’re lucky as fuck I’m not there in person, bitch. I know where the fuck you live.”

Mason.

Ana’s gears shifted into neutral, not quite without a hitch. She turned herself around, leaning against the wall for support and concentrating on slowing and quieting her breathing so she wouldn’t sound scared through the phone. She wasn’t scared. She felt nothing at all.

“So what if I am?” she asked coolly. “We don’t have any further business that I’m aware of. What do you want?”

“Don’t you take that fucking tone with me. You know goddamn well why I’m calling. Who the fuck do you think you are? I treated you right, you cunt! I showed you nothing but respect! And this is how you repay me? I had a fucking plan and you fucked me over for no fucking reason!” Something on his end let out a bang loud enough to hurt Ana’s ear; she thumbed the call onto the speaker instinctively and Mason’s next words came bellowing out, rolling across the room like thunder: “I ought to slam this fucking thing up your ass and out your lying bitch-mouth, you two-faced fucking cum-dumpster!”

Across the room, Bonnie missed his cue on a twirl and Chica dropped through his hands to hit the stage. Ana looked that way, watching poor Chica’s stiff legs kick, either trying to right herself or finish out the dance, unaware that she’d fallen, it was hard to tell. Freddy headed over at once to help Bonnie pick her up, although his ears rotated to keep aiming back at the flood of profanities pouring out of Ana’s phone.

“You fucked me over!” he concluded after he stopped to take a breath. “Don’t you even fucking try to tell me different! And payback’s a bitch, bitch!” From a slight distance came the sounds of his brother Jack chiming in with a detailed account of just how many people would be invited to that particular party and how she would be accommodating them all as hostess, terminating in the sharp sound of a slap. “Shut the fuck up. Now you got one chance to get out of this, so you better shut your fucking cumhole and listen up. You’re going to call Rider—”

“No, I’m not.”

“—and tell him…the fuck did you just say?”

“I said no, I’m not. I’m not calling Rider. You want him to hear something, you tell him yourself. I am not your social secretary.”

“Okay,” said Mason after a lengthy pause. “Okay, that’s how you want it, that’s how it’s going to be. Here I come for your ass, bitch.”

“Come and get me,” said Ana, and Freddy heaved Chica onto her feet and turned around fast with his angry eyes on. “You know where I live. But you better be a lot quieter than the last time or you’re going to finish out this day at the bottom of the fucking quarry with your boy.”

Mason didn’t answer, although his heavy breathing proved he was still on the line. Distantly, Jack attempted to speak and caught another smack.

“Sounds like I got your attention,” said Ana. “Good, because there’s a few things I want to say. You might want to dig the stupid out of your ears and listen up.”

Freddy started for her, eyes flashing and music playing.

“First off, I don’t tell Rider what to do, he tells me. The fact that you don’t understand that extremely basic principle probably has more to do with why he doesn’t want to work with you than anything I could have ever said, but, and this brings me to my second point, if he ever did ask me my opinion of you, I guess I’d have to tell him you are a fucking idiot with the self-control of a toddler and the personality of a roadside toilet. Whatever delusions you may have of convincing me to talk you up to him, you can just ram those right back up your ass where they were born, because it’s not happening.”

“You don’t know who the fuck you’re dealing with.”

“I don’t care, either,” she said, distracted by Freddy, who had come to a stop right in front of her. He had shut off the music, but left his eyes on so she couldn’t help but know she had his full attention. 

“You want to get into this with me, huh? You think you’re such a badass, you can just take me and all my boys on? You think you can fuck with me and come out of it alive?”

“No, of course not, you jackass. The fuck do I look like to you? Run my ass down. See if I care. I’ll do my best to take a few of you with me, but you got a lot of boys and I’m a realist. Just don’t kid yourself here. I may not be the baddest bitch you ever met, but you are far, far, fucking _far_ from the worst Rider ever met. And when he is done with your little boytoys, your brother, your mother and her dogs, he may or may not decide to do you, but if he does, one thing is for fucking sure: you won’t go down easy. I have seen grown men literally beg for a bullet. You see that shit in the movies,” she remarked, watching Freddy watch her. “It’s the sort of thing you think sounds cool but never happens in real life. But it does. And let me tell you, a couple shankings or whatever the fuck you’ve done that you think puts you on his level, it does not begin to prepare you for the kind of hurt that will descend upon your sorry ass. So bring it. I dare you. I double-dutch dare you. Come and get me.”

Breathing.

“Rider tells me you and I are done,” said Ana. “So we’re done. If you don’t agree, you better say so right now, because I can either call him or not call him, and either way, it’s probably going to end badly for me and very badly for you.”

“We’re done, all right. But if I ever see you in my fucking town again—”

“Not this shit again.” Ana sighed, rubbed her eyes, and said, “This town is not that big. We’re going to meet. If you can’t handle that like a grown-up, then we’re not done, are we? So now we’re back to shaking our dicks in each other’s faces, and you know what? I have a killer headache and I’m not doing it twice. So I guess I’m calling Rider after all. Say your prayers, cowboy.”

“Wait.”

She waited, but that was all he seemed willing to say. She said it for him: “Are we done?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure? Because I’m not kidding about that headache. I think I’d rather eat a bullet at this point than listen to more of your bitch-whining.”

“You got a mouth on you,” said Mason softly.

“Yeah, yeah, I got a nose too. What’s your answer?”

He breathed. Freddy stared at her. Bonnie and Chica finished their interrupted dance and took a bow.

“We’re done,” said Mason and hung up on her so he’d be sure to have the last word.

Ana tossed her phone down on the table and slapped both hands over her eyes, pressing until her skull filled with fireworks. “Well, that settles it. I’m going to die in this town,” she muttered and dropped her arms.

Freddy was still there and still glaring.

“I want my pack,” she told him. “I need to go home.”

He squinted at her. “HOME.”

“Yeah, home. You know. That place where people keep their beds and breakfast cereals. Also that place where Mason fucking Kellar and the Macettes are about to show up and trash the fucking place if I’m not there to stop it. Give me my pack.”

Shaking his head, he turned away.

“I said I want my pack!” she called.

“HOW DOES. IT. FEEL. TO. WANT.” he called back and got onstage to start his next act. “SIT. DOWN. AND ENJOY THE SHOW! YOU’RE. NOT. GOING. ANY. WHERE.”

# * * *

The show was different every hour, but that didn’t mean she didn’t get tired of watching it in a hurry. Ana would have left a hundred times over that day, but Freddy wouldn’t give her her damn pack and on the two occasions she made it into the security office without him, she couldn’t find it. She did not give up, but she did settle in and let the anger go. If there was one thing Ana Stark did well, it was deal with things beyond her control.

The time passed, if not at the same speed as it would have done outside. She drank her water. Watched the show. Walked Bonnie up and down the halls between sets (she tried to take him down into the mermaid’s grotto, but he stopped at the mouth of Pirate’s Cove and would go no further, no matter how she asked, and his glitching began to scare her, so she gave in and let him take her back to the dining room instead). Drank more water. Finally peed. Slept. Watched Foxy’s show, or at least listened through the curtain. Went to the mermaid’s grotto alone. Drank more water. Played games on her phone until the battery died. Found a ball in the gift shop and threw it against the wall several thousand times. Slept. Drank. Walked. Rinsed. Repeated.

Whenever she had the chance, she explored, but although there was plenty to see, Freddy was dead-set against her seeing most of it. And it was weird, the places he thought were all right and the ones that weren’t. It wasn’t as simple as employees only or guest areas, because although he told her to get out of the kitchen, he didn’t go in to get her, and while he didn’t let her poke around the office, he didn’t seem to mind much if she went right through it into the employee lounge. He even watched her open a few lockers and didn’t say a word, but he stopped her at once when she tried to clear the barricade blocking off the gymnasium where countless children had played before her, and he dragged her out of the party room by her arm. And it wasn’t a safety issue, because her brief glimpse of the party room indicated it was in much better condition than most of the rest of the building, whereas cluttered, mold-choked rooms like the theater or the arcade were apparently just fine, and of course, he preferred her to be in the dining room, under a roof that was one loud fart away from falling in on top of her. 

She really had to do something about that.

Except no, she didn’t. Not her circus, not her monkeys. Also, it wasn’t her property. Breaking in just to loaf around like this was one thing; home repairs were noisy business, even the simple ones, and this was not a simple one. And while it was true that hardly anyone ever came out on these roads, ‘hardly’ and ‘ever’ were not ‘no one’ or ‘never’. Sure as she climbed up on the roof and starting banging around, someone would drive by. Unless she wanted to try working in the middle of a thunderstorm—

“Or the Fourth of July,” she interrupted herself thoughtfully.

She had been sitting on the lowest bench of the amphitheater in Pirate Cove, well after the show had ended, just soaking in the quiet and the dark and the faint odor of long-rotted rat wafting out of the ballpit behind the curtain, and now she heard a sudden wheeze of fans and the heavy whump of something plastic hitting something wooden.

“Bleedin’ hell, ye st-st-still out there?” A scraping sound, another whump, and then the curtain moved aside, caught on Foxy’s hook. He looked at her, ears up and eyepatch raised. “Quiet as the g-g-grave, ye are.”

“Sorry.” Collecting her latest empty water bottle, Ana stood and rubbed the last hour out of her ass. “Go on with your show.”

“Set’s over. I g-g-got…six minutes. C-C-Come on back and t-t-t—TELL NO TALES—talk for a spell.”

“No, that’s okay. It’s not enough time,” she muttered, looking up into the cavernous black as she climbed the steep amphitheater steps, seeing nothing, but imagining the roof.

“Hell, it’s six minutes.”

“It’s not even six weeks,” she argued, but she was afraid she wasn’t listening. Even if she didn’t have her own axes to grind back at the house, she could not begin to scrape together the materials she’d need for a job of that magnitude, not unless she was willing to empty the goddamn account she’d just acquired, and she wasn’t. Then there was the physical toll to consider. It wasn’t like the roof at Aunt Easter’s; it wasn’t as simple as ripping off old shingles and nailing down new ones. She’d practically have to rebuild the fucking thing. ‘Practically’, ha. She _would_ have to rebuild the fucking thing and she’d have to do it all without power, which was to say, it could not be done. Not at all, much less in that time-frame.

So. Settled.

Still…

No.

Yeah, but—

Rather than tell herself ‘no’ again, her brain played a few notes of the Toreador March, music-box style, and she left the Cove with a laugh. 

Chica was alone on stage when Ana returned to the dining room, but as she waved hello, she also turned her head and chirped out, “I FOUND IT, BONNIE!”

“All this time I thought you were a chicken,” said Ana, tossing her empty bottle and getting a full one from the few remaining. “You’re nothing but a stool-pigeon.”

“STICKS AND STONES MAY BREAK MY BONES,” Chica sniffed as something big came crashing out of the back and through the kitchen. “HI, BONNIE!”

“Hi, Bonnie.” Ana dropped against the back wall and slid down with a bump and groan to the floor as Bonnie hyucked a greeting and grabbed at his muzzle with both hands, ears flat. “Where have you been?”

“GOSH, I WONDER,” said Chica, with what was for her a surprising amount of snark. She waddled over to her end of the stage and took up position behind her absent keyboard. “HEY, KIDS! LOOKS LIKE FREDDY IS ON HIS WAY TO THE MAIN STAGE AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!”

“Ass-kickings all around,” said Ana.

Freddy grunted, not from well down the East Hall, where she’d been half-watching for him, but from almost directly behind her. A moment later, he stepped out from the cross-way between the barricaded playground and the barricaded gymnasium where he’d been standing just out of sight with his eyes off. He sent Bonnie to the stage with a pointing finger, then limped around the table and folded his arms, looking down at Ana and well within grabbing range, if he were so inclined. “WHERE. WERE. YOU.”

“Pirate Cove.”

Bonnie turned around.

Freddy glanced back, augmenting his enforcing point with a grunt, then turned his attention back to Ana. “WHAT. WERE. YOU. DOING.”

She snorted. “Reading comics, smoking crack and having premarital, unprotected sex, of course. I was doing exactly the same shit there as I’m doing now, nothing. Jesus Christ, the way you act, you’d think you were guarding the lost mines of goddamn Solomon. Can I have my pack yet?”

He moved a little closer and bent himself in half to put his huge face right in front of hers. His eyes shifted back and forth, as if reading her. He grunted, straightened, and said, “NO.”

“You know, there’s nothing in that pack I haven’t replaced at least once. I could walk away from it right now.”

He laughed his Freddy-laugh and turned around.

“You don’t think so?”

“I. TOLD. YOU. I. DON’T. HAVE. TO. LET. YOU. LEAVE.”

“Pretty sure I could outrun you, big bear.”

“YOU’LL NEVER KNOW UNLESS YOU TRY.”

Ana had another swig of water, her gaze drifting to the ceiling as Freddy headed for the stage. “Hey, off the top of your head, would you happen to know how big this place is?”

“NO.” Freddy limped another few steps, then stopped and looked around. “WHY?”

“Just curious.” She started to drink some more, then said, “Would Tux know?”

Freddy, heading for the stage, stopped again. This time, he turned all the way around. Frowning. “WHY?”

Because she had a portable generator—it had wheels anyway—and if it was possible to get Tux going, she could maybe have one animatronic in this building that would give her a straight answer to her questions. Then again, if she had the power on in the security office, she could also just get those locked doors open and look for herself. If the building specs were anywhere, they’d be in the manager’s office.

Of course, if she was going home for the generator, she might as well get her laser-tape and tablet and just map the place out herself. That would be lighter, quieter, and maybe even quicker, depending on how big of an ass Freddy was committed to being.

“Never mind,” she said, waving him on. 

On stage, the show had started, but Freddy didn’t budge. “WHAT ARE YOU UP TO?” he asked, too heartily for the suspicion in his eyes.

She thought about it. Not in a casual sense, but in the same way she had thought about the Kellar job—step by step and day by day, what she already had, what she’d have to buy and what she could maybe get away with just renting, crowned and bound by the holy trifecta of time, cost and energy.

She had her own mess to clean up. That was a fact and that fact hadn’t changed, but the mess at Freddy’s was undeniably more appealing. It was just as much work, if not more, but it was all work she could do with her head and her hands, not with her heart. The hoard at home was almost gone, which only meant that everything that was left, every single thing, came with a memory. The pizzeria was in far, far worse condition, but there was no fear of finding David’s homework or empty shoes or any of the thousand pieces of his unfinished life lying on Freddy’s floor.

But it was a lot of work. And a lot of money. And a lot of everything except time, which she did not have at all.

“Nothing,” she told Freddy and had a last bitter swallow of water.

# * * *

Ana fell asleep in the dining room. She didn’t mean to, wasn’t trying to, simply closed her eyes on the sight of Freddy and the band on stage and opened them to find herself in Aunt Easter’s home. 

She knew she was dreaming, not because she could still hear Freddy singing behind the walls and far away and not even because she was wearing Aunt Easter’s old purple work uniform, but just because it was so clean. Seeing the home as she remembered it and knowing it must be a dream because it would never, ever look like this again hurt her heart almost enough to wake her up, but she knew instinctively that what was waiting for her when she woke up was just as bad in its own way. 

She also knew she wasn’t alone, even though she appeared to be. She waited, not-alone in that dark hall, until the grandfather clock chimed and out of nowhere, there was Freddy. 

It was a dream and he was different, not Freddy at all, but a dream-sized version of David’s plushie Fredbear. His matted fur was tarnished gold; his muzzle had been split just to one side of his nose and hung askew; small hands had left dark stains on his face; his eyes were burned sockets filled with wires.

Ana went to him, hugged him. She could feel hands punching and feet kicking at the other side of his hard casing, hear the muffled kittenish cries, but she hugged him anyway and he hugged her back.

Somewhere, outside the dream, the real Freddy sang. The sound echoed on other floors and in other rooms here in the house. Fredbear did not speak. Ana wasn’t sure which of them pulled away first or if they just melted apart, as people do in dreams. However the embrace ended, it ended. Fredbear walked away from her, his footsteps heavy and wet. He went to the clock, her grandfather’s clock, and opened it. He looked back at her, laughed his haunted Freddy-laugh, and ducked inside.

He shouldn’t have fit. He couldn’t have fit. She knew she was dreaming, but she didn’t feel safe.

She followed him.

The clock did not turn itself into that spike-lined coffin this time. Neither did it open on the secret stair that was there in real life. There was nothing behind the clock at all, miles and miles of lightless nothing, and Fredbear was already far ahead of her. She went after him, first walking, then running, but even though his footsteps never quickened, he only got further and further away until he was gone and she came to a door. Not the door in the secret basement, but a metal door, solid and imposing, the kind that movies used to lock up monsters. There was no latch, only a console on the wall with a large square button, blood-red. 

Ana pushed it.

The door flew up with an electronic zip and a clank and vanished into the ceiling, and there was the security office at Freddy’s. 

The lights were on. A monitor on the desk showed the dining room and the stage where Freddy, Bonnie and Chica stood slumped and silent. There was no accompanying keyboard, no mouse, just the monitor. In the corner of the screen was a patternless tangle of shapes she supposed was meant as a map of the building, but its simple squares and lines seemed to be in constant motion, impossible to read. She touched it, hoping to pull it into definite focus, and the image on the screen changed to show her Tux.

So it was a map and this was a closed-circuit security monitoring system. If each of the squares was a room and each of the circles a camera, she could keep an eye over the entire building just from this room. However, even in the dream, it struck her as odd that the camera here was aimed at the animatronic and not at the door next to him…just as the camera in the dining room had been pointed at the stage and not at the tables. 

As she reached to touch another part of the map and see where that camera was pointed, Tux’s eyes opened.

She froze, her arm outstretched and finger pointing, and watched him turn his head to stare directly up at the camera, at her. He raised his own arm, his own finger, as if he could see her and was mocking her, except that he kept lifting it, until he lay it over his split cat-lips. 

_Shhhhh._

Unnerved, she tapped away to a different camera and saw the playground outside, all its missing pieces restored. In place of the shattered plastic feet that she thought belonged to Captain Fox, she instead saw a new animatronic. Long-bodied, short-limbed, with a sly, sleek face and a dark spot over one eye. A weasel, she decided, remembering now the posters of New Faces hanging in the foyer. But hadn’t there been two? Twins? She was sure of it, dream or no dream. Where was the other one?

She touched the map again, but couldn’t tell what she was touching and managed to get the dining room again. There was Freddy, exactly as she’d left him, but Chica was out in the middle of the room, motionless between two tables, and Bonnie was nowhere in sight at all.

Now there was a white line at the bottom of the monitor and even though Ana didn’t know what it was and had not noticed until now that it was even there, she put a finger on it and swiped slowly left and right. The camera turned, panning left and right at her direction. She did not find Bonnie, but she did see Swampy in his nook by the tray return window, slumped and silent. She panned away, panned back, and now Swampy’s head was up and his eyes were open, looking straight at the camera. She panned away, panned back, and now he was gone.

Ana raised her eyes and there was Swampy, rearing up on the other side of the security window. Before she could act, the animatronic alligator turned and swung his scaly tail. The glass shattered, exploding in at her in a shower of confetti and now she was out at the quarry on a sunny afternoon. The giant-sized Freddy-bear was there with her, shreds of David’s Batman t-shirt caught on his teeth and fluttering in the wind. They sat together on the boulder that used to be their Chateau d’If and watched the sun set until she heard the mushy, heavy sound of footsteps coming across the hardpan. She glanced back, but the sun was behind her too and she could see only an indistinct silhouette against its glare and the shine of tarnished gold on its stained fur.

“Don’t look,” said Fredbear, taking her hand. His voice was David’s, small and whispery and full of static. “He doesn’t like it when you look at him.”

She turned back to the quarry and the sun went before her, blinding her, burning her. The rest of the world began its fade to black. There were no stars.

“Does it hurt to die?” Ana asked.

“Yes,” Fredbear said matter-of-factly, still watching the sky as the footsteps came closer and now she could hear the gears grinding and fans whining and the dull clack of dry bones rubbing together. “But then you wake up. And that hurts too. That never stops hurting.”

The thing was right behind her now, crushing desert stone beneath its feet and blowing the stink of rotted cloth and sour meat onto the back of her neck. 

“Don’t be afraid,” said Fredbear as the yellow hands reached out from the periphery of Ana’s vision, throwing their clawed shadows long over hers on the ground. “He likes it when you’re afraid.”

And then it had her.

# * * *

The hand that closed over her shoulder in the dream was metal and cold and covered in rotten cloth, and it stayed just that way as it gently shook her awake. The quarry, David’s giant yellow knock-off Freddy plushie, the unreal sun and starless sky all melted together and crumbled away, but the hand remained and so did the sound of servos and the smell of decay. Ana teetered for a moment on the line separating dreaming reality from living reality and when she fell, she did not immediately know where she landed. She rolled over, reaching up to grip at the arm that held her, and opened her eyes.

The light of two plastic eyes briefly washed outward, blinding her. She could see only the darkness and a blur of purple that slowly, slowly took on a familiar form. 

“You ok-k-kay?” Bonnie asked.

Freddy’s. She was back at Freddy’s. The details of the dream were already fading, leaving her with only the shadows cast by whatever fearful form they had taken while she slept. She was safe now, as she had always been safe. There were no ghosts, no monsters, no giant bears with child-voices scratching through their speakers. There was only Ana on the floor in the dining room of an abandoned pizza parlor and Bonnie was with her, so all was well in the world.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” She smiled to prove it, then let her eyes slide shut and rolled back onto her side. “Is the show over?”

“Yeah, like, hours ag-g-g-go.”

“So did Freddy tell you to watch me and make sure I don’t sleepwalk out of here or are you just watching me sleep for your own amusement?”

“I know how it l-l—LOOK PRETTY TODAY, CHICA—looks, but I’m not creeping on you,” he insisted, raking his fingerbones over the top of his head where he used to have a thicker thatch of purple fur. “I’m just…keeping an eye on you.”

“It’s fine,” she assured him. “I don’t mind. And hey, you’re talking again.”

“Yeah,” he said, seemingly taken aback by this belated observation. “It’s after c-c-cl-closing-ing time. Um…Are you okay, though? You were making-ing…noises.”

“I like your real voice,” she said around a yawn. “I wish you talked like this all the time.”

“So d-d-do I, you have n-n-no— _NO BANANAS!_ —no idea. Were you having-ing a b-b-bad dream?”

“Why can’t you?”

“Huh?”

“Talk, I mean. Why do you have to be so different during the day?”

“T-Technically, I think-k-k I’m diff—DIFFERENCES MAKE US SPECIAL—different at night.”

“Why?”

“You really want-t-t—WANT SOME DELICIOUS FAZBEAR—want to know?” he asked. “Or am I just-t-t boring you b-b-back to sleep?”

Ana made an effort and sat up, propping herself against the wall and trying her best to look awake. “I really want to know.”

“Our sp-speech restrictions were set-t-t pretty high at this loc-c-cation during operating-ing hours, but there aren’t any parameters for cust-t-tomer interactions after cl-closing. So even th-th-though they’re technically still in place, we can k-k-kind of work around them.”

“So how come Chica doesn’t talk like you? Or Freddy?”

“B-Because they’d have to modify their source c-c-code. I c-c-can’t do it for them.”

“You could tell them what to do.”

“They know. It’s not-t-t hard to splice in the variation, but it’s basically an exploit and it c-c-can create exceptions.” His head jerked, as if to demonstrate. “P-P-Pretty sure that medical c-c-crap that comes out somet-t-time—TIME TO ROCK!—times is directly ch-chained to my speech code refactoring,” he added. “Some old zombie p-p-process I accidentally t-t-tapped and now I can’t quarantine it again. And it’s only-ly-ly getting worse, so I can’t b-bl-blame them for not wanting-ing to chip at their code.”

“It’s not serious, is it?” Ana asked, waking up a little more. “I mean, you can’t blue-screen and shut down over something like that, can you?”

Bonnie either twitched or shrugged, which was more or less the same answer. “We d-d-don’t shut down. We…We do something-ing else. Come on,” he said, offering his hand and pulling her to her feet when she took it. “You d-d-don’t care about any of this and I p-p-probably shouldn’t be talking about it anyway. You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said automatically and smiled. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep on your big performance, my man. You looked good up there. It’s too bad the lights don’t work anymore. I’d love to see you in the spotlight.”

His head tipped and he studied her in odd silence for maybe half a minute before he said, “Freddy said-d-d to let you sleep, but you looked-d-d like you were having-ing a bad time.”

“I’m fine. Where is Freddy anyway? He’s still got my pack and at this point, I need to get something to eat.”

“He’s walking around-d-d. Just wait, he’ll b-b-be back through eventually. What were you dreaming-ing about?”

Her smile held. “It’s hot in here,” she said. “I’m going to step outside and get some air.”

“I’ll g-g-get the door,” he offered and limped away. 

She followed him through the kitchen and the storeroom, where he pulled a metal spike of some sort from the runner track of the loading dock door and heaved it open. He held it for her as she ducked under and stepped out onto the concrete walkway that abutted the dock, then joined her at the rails. The wind buffeted his ears; he flipped them around and lowered them almost flat to his head, making him look upset.

“Better?” he asked.

The air blowing in off the quarry was ten thousand times fouler than the air inside the restaurant, but at least it was a breeze, and considerably cooler. It seemed like the heat wave was over. She nodded.

“Good,” he said. “What were you d-d-dreaming about? And don’t kee-ee- _eeeeeee_ —” He smacked his throat. “—keep changing the subject. It makes me feel like you’re skipping a song you d-d-don’t like.”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

His facial features changed, but it was hard to say how, since he was staring out into the desert and not at her. She had to remind herself he didn’t really have feelings to hurt.

“You know how dreams are,” she said. She started to lean on the rails, but they were loose enough under her weight to make her straighten up again. She leaned against Bonnie instead. “It’s all twisted together and fucked up anyway. And it blows away so fast. I don’t even remember. Put your arm around me.”

“Huh?” He looked around at her and his ears snapped up and flopped forward as he saw her pressed up against him. “Whoa, when d-d-did you…? I mean, yeah, ok-k-kay.” Hesitantly, he lifted his arm and after she’d moved right up against his side and gotten comfortable, he lowered it again. His hand touched down in several awkward positions before coming to rest. 

“I keep thinking David was in it,” said Ana, even as she wondered why in the hell she was still talking. 

The metal hand on her shoulder tightened to a painful grip. One of his spasms. “D-D-David?”

“My cousin. My best friend. We were kids here together. I thought I told you about him,” she remarked, scanning the desert and the murky sky above it, too cloudy for stars. “I guess I told Foxy.” 

Bonnie looked back at the building, then at her again. “You did? What-t-t—WHAT DO YOU CALL A CHICKEN WITH A—What did you t-t-tell him?”

She peered up at him, squinting with bewilderment instead of distance. “That I had a cousin named David. Why?”

Bonnie’s ears came up, shaking in the wind, and went down again. “Had-d-d?”

She stared, then laughed. “Of all the things for you to hook onto,” she said to herself and looked back into the desert. “Yeah. Had. He died a long time ago. Only he didn’t. He just went away. Except maybe he didn’t do that either. He’s just…gone,” she decided with a grand, empty gesture toward the quarry. “He’s gone.”

“What was he like?”

“Who, David? He was…” She smiled, thinking, remembering. “Smart. God, he was so smart. I never thought about it until after I left, because you don’t, you know? When it’s something you see every day, you have no idea how amazing something is. And he was amazing. He could read before he was four. He was programming code when he was six. I mean, sure, it was pretty basic code. I think his first game was just a big purple face that smiled if you patted it and got mad if you slapped it and burped if you fed it. Super mature, right? But he made a bunch more and some of them were really cool. He wasn’t nerdy, though. He used to hide how smart he was around other kids so he wouldn’t get stuck with the nerd-badge. He wouldn’t even wear his glasses at school and only half the time at home. He couldn’t see, so he’d just memorize everything. He had an eidetic memory, almost total recall. He knew all of Foxy’s stories, word for word, yars and me hearties and all.” She trailed off there, lost in thought, and finally said, “He played soccer and baseball at recess and he was really good at them, but he never tried out for the teams. He was smart, but he didn’t want to be a nerd, and he was sporty, but he didn’t want to be a jock. He just…wanted to be, you know? Hell, you—wait, no.” She laughed, shaking her head. “I was going to say, you probably knew him, but he was gone before this place ever opened. It was the other Freddy’s he used to hang out at. And, God, did he hang out there. Every day, practically. That was probably the real reason he didn’t go out for sports. It would have cut into his valuable Freddy’s-time. Well, his mom worked there,” she explained, even though Bonnie had not asked and was in fact listening with an attitude of intense silence. “Maybe she even worked here. It’s hard to imagine her just…just going back to work like nothing happened, but I guess she had to eat. And buy forty thousand salad spinners,” she muttered and sighed.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. His mom said his father came and got him. Some kind of custody thing, I guess.” She watched the dim, dark lines of the trees blow against the night sky. “My mom told me he was dead, but that’s just the sort of thing she would tell me. She didn’t like me or David or Easter.”

“Easter?”

“My aunt. David’s mom. Like the bunny,” she added, twisting around to give him a smile. “Aunt Easter.”

“Easter,” he echoed and his hand on her shoulder finally relaxed. “Oh. Okay.”

“Anyway, Aunt Easter told me his dad showed up and David had to go live with him for a while. And she said…I think she said…I could meet him. Maybe go with him? I don’t remember anymore. I think I might be mixing up two different times.”

“Why d-d-do you say it like that?”

“Like what?” she asked, frowning up at him in surprise. “Say what? What am I saying?”

“You’ve d-d-done it twice now. ‘She told me.’ Not, ‘His dad came,’ but, ‘She told me his dad came.’” 

She stared at him, her mouth slightly ajar, and finally had to laugh.

“Why do you s-s-say it like that-t-t?” Bonnie persisted, narrowing his eyes.

“God, after all the times I’ve done that to other people, I never realized what a dick move it really is.” Ana shook her head and turned her attention back out into the desert. It was too dark to see the quarry, but she imagined she could make out the blacker shape of it in the indistinct darkness, stretched open in its perpetual hungry gape. “I mean, I guess I did, that’s why I do it, but seriously, I don’t like it.”

“You th-th—THINK IT’S TIME FOR ANOTHER SONG—think if you ignore me, I’ll quit-t-t asking-ing?”

“Here’s hoping.” She laughed again, then sighed and gave his cracked chest a gentle slap to let him know he’d won. “She told me his dad came to get him. My mom told me he was dead. I believed them both and I didn’t believe either of them. But you know, as much as I guess I believe the custody-thing…I think of him as dead. Not just gone away, but gone forever. My aunt’s voice…it was the last time I ever heard her voice and it was so…so…” Ana shook her head, not trying to remember, but to forget. _Honeybunny_ , she’d called her. _It was just time…Sometimes things have to change…Why don’t you come over?...It’ll be our secret…_

And her mother’s voice, cutting across all that like a razor: _He’s dead._

“She told me his father came to get him,” said Ana now, scarcely aware she was talking at all. “And in the same breath, she told me he was there at Freddy’s. And she sounded awful, not just like he was dead, but like _she_ was. I had nightmares of that phone call for years. Shit, I have them still. The ones where the phone rings and it’s her…and she tells me David’s there and he wants to see me. Only it’s like she saying two different things, you know? About two different people. I hang up and turn around and she’s there at the end of the hall, coming toward me, but all I can see is her face and it’s bone-white. And she’s smiling and crying both at the same time. I loved her,” Ana said, staring into empty night. “Now all my dreams of her are nightmares.”

“Wait-t-t, he was at Freddy’s? He was t-t-taken at Freddy’s?”

“I don’t know. I only know I never saw David again. His dad took him and my mom took me. And you know how it is,” she remarked, tracking a slip of red dust as it tumbled across the parking lot. “When little kids are taken in Mammon, they never ever come back.”

Bonnie did not reply to that, but after three or four seconds, he took his arm off her and moved to the end of the walkway. He gripped the rusted rail with his metal hand and turned his head, looking at the graffiti on the side of the building where the anatomically-correct versions of the animatronics disemboweled, decapitated and devoured hapless trespassers.

“But I came back,” said Ana, looking back at the desert. “And I’m living in his house, you know? I’m seeing everything he left behind, exactly the way he left it. And I’m not just picking it up, I have to throw it away.” The wind blew harder, colder. It was refreshing for a moment, then uncomfortable. Fucking weather in this town. “It’s my own fault.”

“Don’t-t-t say that,” Bonnie said, keeping his back to her. “You know it-t-t isn’t true.” 

“I don’t mean what happened. I couldn’t have done anything about that. I was ten. I mean now, this.” She knocked on her chest. “The way I feel about it. I knew I wasn’t going to come back and find them both waiting for me and everything all sunshine and good times. Hell, I thought for sure I was going to find her body buried in that goddamn hoard and I didn’t, so if anything, I’ve come out ahead. I should just be happy about that, right?” 

He didn’t answer and in the quiet, the sound of the wind gusting and dying became the breath of the quarry, cold and sour. She tried to remember the good times playing there, because there had been good times, she knew, even as foul as it had always been, but the only thing that came in clear was that last day. Playing with David at the quarry, on a day they shouldn’t have gone. His serious face, blond hair snapping in the wind, the sun shining too bright on his glasses. And then the rumble of engines, the crunch and scrape of tires leaving the broken road and coming straight at them across the hardpan. Her mother, flying out and at her, catching her by the hair. David, yelling, trying to pull her back. Another car, too late to do anything as Ana’s mother hit her and hit her and hit her and finally threw her. Her head struck the boulder that had been their Chateau d’If when they played Monte Cristo, and suddenly, even in her memory of this terrible day, she was at Gallifrey’s with David, years ago, when she was still Honeybunny and he was Honeybear, and they were eating ice cream sundaes and giggling together as they watched Aunt Easter and the man that was sometimes with her dancing over by the jukebox. Mia Rose was singing _Love Is Dangerous_ and they were waltzing to it, sappy as a scene in a movie, heedless of the pinched-face scowls of the other grown-ups watching them. Then she was back in the desert and it was ice cream running in her eyes and crows screaming at each other and David kneeling at her side, pressing the doubloon into her slack hand and telling her to put it under her mother’s mattress so Foxy would come.

“But he didn’t,” said Ana, rubbing without realizing it at the scar hidden in her hair. “I waited up all night.”

“Who? For what-t-t?”

“Nothing. No one. I don’t want to go home,” she blurted. “I hate it there. I used to love it. It was my one safe place, my one good place…and now I hate it and I hate that I hate it. I’m not scared. I’m not saying there’s ghosts or anything stupid like that. I know he’s not rattling chains in the attic. Or locked up in the basement. But it’s still awful, you know? My aunt lost her goddamn mind when she lost her son and now they’re both gone and it’s just me, alone in the fucking ruins of a life I _almost_ had! I hate it there so much—” She stopped herself with a laugh and flung out her arms in a kind of deprecating triumph. “—that I’d rather be _here!_ ”

Bonnie glanced at her, then abruptly let go of the rail and straightened up.

Ana gave him a quizzical frown, then turned around herself.

Freddy was standing in the mouth of the loading dock door.

“Jesus Christ, but you’re quiet when you want to be,” said Ana.

He grunted and stepped out onto the walkway with them. “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE,” he said, not unsurprisingly. And then looked directly at Ana. “KNEE. THERE. SHOULD. YOU.”

Ana sighed. “Yeah, yeah. Restaurant’s closed, kitchen’s off-limits, and no blocking the exits. Don’t you ever get tired of reading off the fucking rulebook?”

“I. GET. TIRED. OF HAVING. TO.” Freddy’s gaze shifted to Bonnie. “INSIDE. NOW.”

“Sorry,” Bonnie said, shutting off his eyes. In the dark, barely perceptible by intermittent starlight, he moved past Ana—she reached out to pat his arm as he went by, but he did not seem to notice or at least did not react—and ducked back under the hanging door into the store room, leaving her alone with Freddy.

He looked at her just the same way he’d looked at her after he’d caught her kissing on Bonnie—not clicking through sound-bites, but only thinking—and she knew when he got around to talking, he wasn’t going to say anything she wanted to hear. 

Well, she wasn’t going to wait for it.

“I’m leaving,” she said. “With my pack or without it.” 

He grumbled deep in his speakers, looked back into the dark mouth of the store room, glanced at her, then turned all the way around and walked away. Ana waited where she was, leaning against the back wall with her hands stuffed in her pockets and her shoulders hunched against the wind, thinking again how she’d been drowning in sweat just hours ago and listening to Freddy’s footsteps recede. Soon, she heard Bonnie’s voice rising in what sounded like a question, although she couldn’t make out the words. Freddy’s response was terse, maybe just a grunt. He was good at those. Then, nothing.

She thought of David.

Bonnie’s voice bled back in through the constant whisper and howl of the wind, his stutter discernable even if his words were not.

“NO,” said Freddy, firm as a fist.

Bonnie: “…just-t-t until to-to—TO ROCK!—tomorrow!”

“SHE. DOESN’T. BE. LONG. HERE,” said Freddy, now in the store room. “SHE. NEEDS. TO. GO. HOME.”

“Freddy, p-p-p-please!”

“I. SAID. NO. ENOUGH. GO.”

“Can’t I at-t-t le— _eeeeee_ —east t-t-talk-k-k to her?”

“NO.” Freddy gripped the underside of the loading dock door, but stopped there, his head bent. His fingers scraped at the metal, digging into it like it was clay. His eyes shifted, met Ana’s. He didn’t blink; she looked away. He straightened and turned back. “BONNIE. IT’S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE.”

Bonnie came at once, banging into shelves and tables and other junk as he limped too fast through the cluttered store room. Freddy stepped aside to clear the doorway, pulling Ana’s pack off his shoulder and pushing it too hard against Bonnie’s chest when he reached him. 

“THIS. IS. THE END,” said Freddy, letting his eyes light up and a few notes of his March play. “DO YOU UNDERSTAND? SHE. CAN’T. KEEP. COMING. HERE. AND. I. CAN’T. KEEP. LETTING. HER. GO. THIS. IS. NOT. SAFE. FOR. ANY. OF. US.” He pointed at Bonnie, eyes flashing on each word. “THIS. IS. THE END.”

Bonnie didn’t answer, just stood there with his ears down, holding Ana’s pack until Freddy moved out of his way. Freddy knew the difference between silence and assent; he watched through narrow eyes, arms folded and fingers flexing on his cracked casing, as Bonnie limped over and handed Ana her pack.

“C-Come b-b-back,” he said, as quietly as he could. “Okay? Come back-k-k soon.”

“I can’t. He’s right. I can’t keep doing this. It hurts. Now come on,” she said, shifting her pack aside and holding out her arms with a determined smile. “Kiss me goodbye.”

He didn’t move. “I c-c-can’t,” he said. “It hurts.” 

“Oh Bonnie, of all the things you could have said…I’m ruining you, aren’t I?” She sighed, touched his muzzle, and turned away. There were stairs at the far end of the walkway, but her truck was right here, so she sat on the edge of the dock and dropped off. There was a time she could have just jumped, but even this little height jarred her ankles and her knees. Getting old, she thought. Who would have ever thought she’d live so long?

Bonnie stood motionless at the rails, just watching her walk away, until Freddy came to collect him. He allowed himself to be turned and nudged back toward the building, but before he ducked under the loading dock door, he shrugged off Freddy’s hand and swung around to blurt, “I L-L-L—LOVE HANGING OUT WITH MY NEW FRIENDS! I-I-I I LOVE PIZZA! I LOVE P-P-PEPPERONI—damn it—AND EXTRA CHEESE!” just as she climbed up into the truck.

Ana shoved her pack into the passenger seat, buckled her belt, started the engine and leaned out to catch the door. “I love you too,” she called and slammed it shut, muttering, “But we’ll always have Pirate Cove.”

She drove away shaking her head and smiling at herself for waiting until she was this old before turning into a teenager and then wasting all the good stupid-in-love moments on a broken-down robotic rabbit who only loved her when he saw her. And even then, he cared just as much about whether or not she flossed as whether he’d ever see her again.


	17. Chapter 17

# CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The week that followed was a bad one, but hardly the worst of her life and she got through it with only one lapse—one joint, just one, to help her sleep on Monday night. The rest of the time, she was able to work herself to a state of sufficient exhaustion by cleaning the house and taming the yard. Whenever boredom or nerves intruded, she occupied herself with small cosmetic repairs, but the cloud of futility darkened daily and by the time Tuesday morning saw her driving down the road to Gallifrey’s, she had convinced herself not even the ghost of Johnnie Cochran himself could save her aunt’s home. 

There were two men waiting for her in the corner booth at the diner. The lawyer looked more or less as Ana had pictured him, enough that she doubted she needed the red tie he was indeed wearing to help her identify him; mid-fifties, well-groomed, soft around the midsection and hard around the eyes, despite his personable smile. The other was a young man, enthusiastic as a puppy, with somewhat unfortunate looks and no conception of an ‘indoor voice’. Before he could be properly introduced, he popped out of the booth to shake her hand, tripped over his shoes, and ended up on one knee gripping her hand in both of his clammy ones, so that the entire breakfasting crowd turned around to watch a marriage proposal.

“Whoa,” he said, too loudly. “That is one serious sunburn. You’re shedding like a snake. Also, nice ink! I always wanted to get a tattoo, but my mom would kill me. Your eyes are the bluest I’ve ever seen. It’s kind of creepy. Are the pancakes good here? I’m not a pancake guy, but I’m kind of feeling the pancakes.”

Ana looked at the lawyer. “Mr. Schumacher?”

“Heel, son,” the other man said and the puppy bounded up and folded himself back into the booth. “Lem Schumacher,” he said, extending his own hand for a lawyerly shake. “This is my associate, Mr. Madison. I am your attorney. He’s an expert witness on loan for the occasion. And you must be Ana Stark. Please, sit.”

She sat.

They talked for the better part of two hours, although very little of what they discussed had anything to do with the house. The lawyer kept saying that could wait until they saw it. Instead, he kept directing the conversation to the town itself, making notes when Ana could see nothing at all noteworthy about what she was saying, and asking questions that painted a picture of Mammon as a seething beehive of intolerance, sexism, and general assholery, all of it crowned with a halo.

“Look, I see where you’re going with this,” Ana said finally, “but I am not comfortable playing the religion card.”

“You don’t have to,” he replied, typing away on his notebook. “That’s my job. And I’m very good at it, Miss Stark.”

“Yeah, but I really, honestly, genuinely do not believe this has anything to do with where I spend my Sundays.”

“Why they’re harassing you is irrelevant,” he said, still typing. “It only matters what they can prove. And if I do my job correctly, which I will, what they’ll have to prove is that not being Mormon is not the reason they are harassing you.”

“Kind of hard to prove a negative, isn’t it?”

“It’s impossible. And that is why we’ll win. However, before we get too far ahead of ourselves on that end of things, I’d like Mr. Madison’s opinion of the house.”

“I looked for it on Google-Map,” the puppy interjected, looking up from the Eschler-esque sculpture he was constructing from the uneaten portion of his breakfast. “I thought everything was on Google-Map, but I can’t find a single street in this whole town on street-view. It’s weird. It’s like it doesn’t even exist.”

“We’re a small town.”

“No, I mean it’s weird,” the puppy stressed, leaning across the table (and his pancakes). “Did you know there’s a super-secret military installation just twelve miles from here?”

“Uh, did you know they pulled stakes and moved out, like, fifty years ago?” Ana countered. “Super-secret, nothing. Everyone knows about that.”

“Yeah, but nobody knows what they were doing, that’s my point. It was all top-secret shit. No one knows.”

“They were trying to build rockets and jet planes and stuff,” said Ana. “There’s a whole museum here in town full of their failures. They sell postcards of the stupider ones right in the lobby.”

“What?”

“Seriously, you should go. They’ve got a little theater with a film on permanent loop where they show crash after hilarious crash. I was in there for an hour and I wasn’t even stoned. Some of the things they were trying…I mean, yeah, I’m sure it didn’t help that the weather out here is fucking nuts, but mostly, they just didn’t know what the hell they were doing and the results are a triumph of human fuckery.”

“Are you sure?” the puppy asked, looking disappointed.

“You don’t believe me, you can go out to the old site anytime you want and poke around. Just about everyone around here does. No one’s going to jump out of a black, unmarked helicopter and shoot you. No one’s going to tranq you and take you to their underground laboratory and interrogate you in a cinderblock room filled with vats of genetically-engineered hybrid-alien supersoldiers. Nothing’s there but a lot of snakes and they’re just the usual kind, not the cyborg mutant ones that spit acid.”

“You can always tell the ones whose parents let them watch television unsupervised,” the lawyer remarked, folding his computer away with one hand while checking his phone with the other. “Are we ready to go?”

In short order, they were back on the road, Ana leading the way in her truck and the lawyer following in a rental with the puppy bringing up the rear in a Prius with a bicycle on the back, skis on the roof, and golf clubs in the back seat, just in case he had the chance to get in some sport on this trip. She couldn’t help wondering if Rider had found him in the phone book or just out in his stables. She also couldn’t help glancing over at Freddy’s when she passed Edge of Nowhere, but of course, the pizzeria was dark and still. If Bonnie was pining away for her, he was doing it out of sight

But he wasn’t, she thought, glancing at the clock on the dash. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. He’d be onstage, guitar in hand and chin on his chest, standing by and waiting for the doors to open. Also, he was a robot and didn’t have feelings, she reminded herself. Funny how often that part didn’t factor in when she thought about him.

Almost as funny as the fact that she thought about him as ‘him’ and not ‘it’. 

Or the fact that she thought about him at all when there were so many more important things to think about. Like the fact that at this time tomorrow, there was a good chance she’d be homeless and driving back to California to ask Rider yet again if he’d pretty-please let her stay with him until she could get back on her feet. Or that she might not be homeless after all, which meant she’d have to take her aunt’s house, not just fix it but live in it. Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria and Bonnie the Bunny were only the latest items on a long list of things she couldn’t have and didn’t need anyway. She had real problems right now. Focus.

And yet, she was still thinking about him when she came out of the trees lining the long driveway and pulled around the waterless fountain to park. She sat, waiting for the lawyer and the puppy to pull in behind her, thinking how much she wanted this to be over. Whether she won the house or lost it did not matter anymore. She could deal with the consequences, whatever they might be; it was the suspense that was killing her.

“After having seen the rest of the town, I confess I was expecting something very different,” the lawyer said as they all came together by the gate. “In fact, if you’ll forgive an unprofessional outburst, damn. What would you even call this, Mr. Madison? Post-Modern Vampirian?”

“It’s what we in the biz call Neo-Gothic Eclectic,” the puppy said, turning in a full circle as he walked to take in everything. “And it’s fucking gorgeous. Is this a Meade? It’s got to be a Meade. Or a Bellows. When was it built?”

“I have no idea,” said Ana, leading the way around the side of the house since it was obvious they both wanted to see it all. “The quarry ran from 1880-something to 1920-something, so probably somewhere in there.”

“Is that who lived here? The guy who ran the mine?”

“Stands to reason, doesn’t it? There’s nothing else out here.”

“What’d they mine?” the puppy wanted to know, shading his eyes against the early rays of the sun as he peered through the trees at the dropoff and the desert beyond, with the black hole of the quarry in the distance. 

“There’s supposedly copper here in the mountains, so that’s what they were after in the beginning, but the rock is too unstable to get it out. So they moved out into the hardpan and started quarrying rocks for, like, bricks and tiles and shit, and at the bottom of the three-hundred foot pit they created, they found this stuff.” She reached out to pat the black stone trimming out the house. “It’s unique to this area, can’t be found anywhere else in the world. The mining museum—”

“You have a lot of museums for such a small town,” remarked the lawyer.

“Can’t swing a dead cat,” Ana agreed. “I don’t remember there being so many when I was a kid, but I wasn’t really a museum-kid back then, so, yeah.”

“But you’re a museum-adult now?” the lawyer inquired.

“Hell yeah, I am. I’m classy as fuck. Anyway, the museum’s theory was that it was a meteorite. Limited supply plus super pretty equals big money, so they sunk a bunch of shafts and tunnels and stuff and started sending guys underground to get every last scrap, which they hadn’t done until that point and probably didn’t know how to do, but whatever. The town’s booming, people coming in, money coming in, mine getting bigger and guys getting hurt. Then one day, the main tunnel collapsed. Guy who owns the mine says everyone’s got to be dead, but the other miners up top say they can hear yelling through the pipes that push air down to the bottom. So the town starts planning a search and rescue and somehow, in that process, those pipes as well as the pumps that keep the tunnels from flooding out get switched off and pretty soon, there’s no more yelling. Guy who owns the mine again insists everyone’s got to be dead and it’s too dangerous to go in after them, but now the folks from town are pissed and they start digging anyway. Only they’re no better at digging than the guy is at planning a mine, and there’s a second collapse. Sixteen guys get caught in it and that’s the end of the rescue effort.”

“Lord, lady,” laughed the puppy. “I hope there’s a happy ending coming.”

“Wait for it,” she assured him. “Two months later, one of the would-be rescuers comes staggering into town. Pretty thin, but not as thin as he ought to be, if you get me.”

“This is the legend part of the local legend, yes?” said the lawyer, looking bored.

“Nope, it really happened. There are photos in the museum from the trial.”

“Trial?”

“Yeah, the ‘C’ word never came out, but they charged him for interfering with remains. Hung him smack in the middle of the town.”

“You don’t say.”

“Same spot where they hold the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony,” she said with a nod. “There’s a photo of the whole friggin’ town turned out and posing for the camera while he’s swinging over their heads. Nope, the legend part is the usual ‘and now their hungry ghosts wander the tunnels forever’ horseshit. Every time someone goes missing, some smirking jackwit just has to suggest they must have been poking around out at the quarry and been eaten by a ghost.”

“Every time? How often does that happen?” asked the puppy and the lawyer shot him a sharp, censuring glance.

“More often than you’d think,” said Ana. 

“So you got a meteorite,” said the puppy, counting it off on his fingers. “Which, by the way, I am not discounting as a possible alien crash-site. And a super-secret military operation, fringe religious zealots, cannibals and a haunted mine. All you need now is a creepy talking doll and you got Stupid Horror Movie Bingo.”

“Funny you should mention that,” Ana said with a smile, but did not elaborate. “Anyway, that’s the story. Obviously the mine never re-opened. The guy who owned it took his bags of money and went to California, where he dedicated the rest of his life to debauchery. So there’s a happy ending after all, it’s just his.”

“And you think this was his home?” the lawyer asked as they came back around to the front yard and climbed the stairs to the porch.

She shrugged. “I keep hearing how the house has a ‘history’ and that sure fits the bill. It’s in the right place. Plus—” Ana unlocked the front door and heaved it open, gesturing within to the grand stair and marble foyer. “—there’s all the stonework.”

“I repeat, damn.”

“What happened here?” the puppy asked, bolting inside and hunkering immediately so that Ana nearly tripped over him in following. He touched one of the cracked places on the floor. “Someone break in?”

“There was a hoard,” Ana told him, watching with amusement as he squat-walked to the next crack. “I’ll show you what’s left of it when we get to the basement, but you’ll have to take my word for it when I say it was intense. A lot of stuff got broken.”

“Yeah, but no.” The puppy pointed. “See these radiating lines?”

“I guess?”

“That’s an impact. Someone hit this. Not hard, or it’d be a lot bigger. And not that heavy, or the cracks would go a lot deeper,” he added, frowning around at the next broken place. He started to say something more, but broke off, standing and backing up almost to the door as he stared from one point of damage to the next and the next. “You know what it looks like from here?”

“Stress fractures?” Ana guessed, because that would be just her luck. The house was going to be condemned after all. Already, her mind was moving ahead, to the process of packing up and renting another trailer, talk to Rider, get on the road…maybe stop one last time at Freddy’s…

“Footprints.”

She looked at him. She looked down.

“I mean, that’s not what they are, obviously,” the puppy was saying, miles away and unimportant. “The guy would have had to weigh, like, four hundred pounds and be wearing a pair of iron boots. But that’s what it looks like. Same, you know, stride. Left, right, left, right. See it?”

She did, and now that she had seen it, it could not be unseen. It made a clear trail, upstairs and down, halfway down the hall and back again.

“But you don’t have to worry about weight,” said the puppy as he walked away, unaware that the world had stopped spinning and the sun was going out. “Weight alone could not make those radiating lines. Something totally hit it. Like, a sledgehammer, if someone was just walking along and you know, kind of lifting and dropping it. Probably trying to decide where to start swinging. Some people, you know? Whoa, that is one fucked-up clock.”

He said more, she was sure, about the clock and the twisted fairy tales carved there, but although she could hear his voice, the words themselves faded out and she was left alone with the footprints set in stone.

Foxy. Foxy’s legs, bare metal bones below the knees. That doubloon had been gold-painted die-cast steel and the curse had been nothing but a badly-crafted poem printed on a placemat, but in that moment, Ana was ten years old all over again and watching, intangible as any ghost, as Foxy came through that door in the middle of that long-dead night. Halfway down the hall, he’d heard a noise (in Ana’s merciless imagination, it was the flushing of a toilet; David had wet the bed until he was eight and even at eleven still got up several times every night to pee) and had run upstairs. A crash. A cry. And now Foxy was coming back, with fresh blood shining on his hook but without his cutlass. That, he’d left hanging on the wall over David’s bed, a fitting trophy for a fallen opponent… 

The vision faded as Foxy stepped off the stairs, leaving her grown-up in the foyer with two strange men who were already moving on to examine the rest of the house.

“You don’t believe it,” Ana whispered, raking a hand through her hair until her fingers knotted up at her braid. “Come on. You don’t really think Foxy the fucking pirate ran all the way from Freddy’s—from the Freddy’s at Circle Drive, smack in the middle of town!—to kill David over a fucking party favor, do you? Come on, _do_ you?”

She waited, holding her breath. In the quiet, she could hear the puppy in the formal dining room, exclaiming over the fireplace and racking up a list of questions she needed to answer, but she didn’t care. Did she or did she not believe it, that was the only question that mattered right now. She knew it wasn’t true, that was beside the point. Did she _believe_ it? Because talking to the animatronics was one thing and making out with one was something else, but honest-to-God believing one of them had killed her cousin, run him down and slit him lights to liver, _that_ was finally pure-D fucking crazy, and if that was what she was, all well and good, but she had to know _now_.

The grandfather clock’s pendulum swung, meticulously counting out the seconds. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

No. 

No, she didn’t.

Which was not the same as believing Foxy couldn’t have done it, but for right now, just believing that he hadn’t would have to do.

Ana let out her pent-up breath and took another, holding out her hand and watching with detached fascination as it trembled. She made a fist, opened it, and waited until she was sure she was steady. She was. She went to find the lawyer.

# * * *

Ana didn’t think she’d sleep that night, or at least, that she’d give in and have to take a little pink pill to do it, but even though she did nothing more demanding than walk the lawyer and the puppy through the house for three or four hours, when she climbed into the bed of the truck, she had just enough time to think once again that she needed either to go back to Freddy’s and get her sleeping bag or buy another one and then she was out.

She knew she dreamed, because she woke with tears on her face, but she couldn’t remember anything concrete, just a tangle of impressions—the ticking of the clock, dark water pouring in through a broken car window, a ringing phone, a trapdoor spider, David’s face, Freddy’s laugh—that did not join together and made no separate sense. Anyway, it all melted as soon as she woke up, so she was fine. 

It was still early, just after sunup, so Ana had plenty of time to herself. She passed it as constructively as she could, taking down her clothesline and shower and generally erasing all signs of her presence. Her camp wasn’t that big, but over the past few weeks, she had apparently been opening boxes and spreading her few possessions throughout the house and garage. Sweeping it all back together took longer than expected. She was still at it when the lawyer and the puppy showed up at half-past eight. 

The puppy had brought doughnuts, so Ana dug out her propane stove again and put the coffeepot on. While the water heated up, the lawyer opened up the back of his rental car and brought out some high-dollar camping chairs, a card table, and a brand-new box of Scrabble. “Get comfortable,” he suggested with a lawyerly smile. “We’re going to be waiting for a while.”

They were.

At a quarter to six in the evening, Ana at last heard the distinct sound of tires crunching over gravel. The puppy hopped up at once, but the lawyer merely lay down tiles and collected ninety-two points for SURVIVAL on a triple word-score space, so the puppy sat down again, knees jittering with excitement.

A moment later, the car came into view. It stopped, idling, then eased forward and parked, keeping plenty of distance between it and the other vehicles next to Ana’s truck. Two doors opened. Ana didn’t recognize the man emerging from the passenger seat, but the woman who had been driving was very familiar to her.

“That’s the Rutter woman,” she murmured, frowning at her tiles. Why did she always end up with the J? JAR. Ten points. Better than nothing. The lawyer was ahead by more than five hundred points anyway. “The one who said my aunt was burning in hell.”

“Excellent. I was so hoping she’d turn out. Mr. Madison, the camera.” As the puppy leapt up and jogged away, the lawyer began to fold away the board game, speaking calmly and even pleasantly just under his breath. “Now remember, no matter what happens, let me do the talking. If there is to be shouting and name-calling, it has to come from them, understand?”

“Yes.”

“No threats of any kind. Don’t get cute, don’t get funny, and above all, don’t get angry. One threat from you, however veiled you may think it to be, and your case is irrevocably compromised.”

“Got it.”

“Good. This will all be over soon,” he told her with that unpleasant smile. “If you can get through the next hour or so without flinching, you will have a home.”

“I never flinch.”

“Very good. And here’s Mr. Madison back, so stay close and be quiet. Good evening!” he called, heading over to meet the man and Mrs. Rutter with his hand extended and fangs exposed. “I am Miss Stark’s attorney, Mr. Schumacher, and this is my associate, Mr. Madison. And for the record—”

The puppy set a heavy and expensive-looking video camera on his shoulder and aimed it at the other two.

“—who are you?” the lawyer concluded.

The man looked at the camera like it was a gun and then at Mrs. Rutter, who looked at each of them in turn, but who began and ended with Ana.

“This is Mr. Edward Planchette,” she said finally, still staring at Ana. “He is a licensed housing inspector representing the Department of Health and Social Services for the city of Mammon.”

The man beside her offered a puzzled how-do and offered his hand. Ana shook it. Her lawyer did not.

“He is,” said the lawyer, with an emphasis on the first word. “I see. And who are you?”

Mrs. Rutter took a long time answering that innocuous question, especially as her answer was, “I’ll be accompanying Mr. Planchette as a witness.”

The lawyer allowed his expression to show mild confusion, although his eyes remained steady and unsurprised by this evasiveness. “And your name is?”

“I don’t see how that is relevant.”

“You’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you it is,” the lawyer replied. “What is your name, please? For the record.”

Another pause, even longer than the first. At last: “Wendy Rutter.”

“And you are a town commissioner, are you not?”

Ana did not flinch, but it was a damned near thing. She still had only the vaguest idea what an Abstract Title Office person did, but she was pretty sure town commissioners did not have to moonlight as one to make ends meet.

“I am,” said Mrs. Rutter. She didn’t flinch either.

“Did you introduce yourself as such on your prior meeting with my client?”

“I saw no reason to do so. It wasn’t a social call. It was purely professional.”

“Professional. I see. Well, we’ll get back to that in a moment. In the meantime, perhaps you’d like to tell me just what entitles the city of Mammon or, perhaps I should say, its commissioner, to subvert city ordinances for their own purposes in a blatantly illegal attempt to remove my client from her home?”

“I’ve done no such thing. The property has been derelict for over ten years. It represents a severe public health hazard. The city is obligated to proceed with an order to condemn and as a commissioner, I am obligated to see those ordinances carried out.”

“Madam, your authority in this town, charming as it is, does not and can not supersede state or federal law,” he said. “Under Rule 71.1, you cannot serve a notice of condemnation or a written order to vacate without appending a copy of the inspection report detailing the areas of the property unsafe for human habitation. Nor can you do so without scheduling a court hearing—yes, a court hearing, madam,” he interrupted himself as Mrs. Rutter’s lips thinned. “Not a piece of paper no one but yourself and my client has any knowledge of and which can easily be disposed of, but a _court_ hearing, in _court_ , with accompanying documentation. Moreover, said hearing is to take place at the county level, not the city level, and only after such a hearing has been held is my client obligated to move on whatever repairs or adjustments to the property are judged necessary. Judged, let me reiterate, in _court_.”

“I resent the implication—”

“I’m not finished. At that hearing, which my client has not yet received and which must follow an inspection and precede an order to vacate, not the other way around, my client may have witnesses testify as to the structural integrity of the residence. Mr. Madison here, for example, is a structural engineer whose expertise on the subject of hazards and housing codes has been invaluable in this case, and after a thorough, if unofficial, inspection of the house, he can find no reason why this house should be condemned and he is fully prepared to testify to that effect.”

“In court,” the puppy amplified. 

“In Mr. Madison’s expert opinion, there is no earthly reason why my client should not be permitted to move right in and begin the entirely cosmetic repairs and renovations as she sees fit. She, madam, not you and certainly not the church—forgive me, the city you represent. The further fact—well-documented, by the by, thank you for that—that you have already served her with an order to vacate, fined her for accessing her own property in an effort to satisfy the city’s wildly unlawful injunctions, and denied her the opportunity to challenge said unlawful injunction at a court hearing, all before the property has even been inspected, strongly suggests that you’ve shown up here today with her final notice in hand. May I see it?”

The man shot Mrs. Rutter a nervous sidelong glance. The woman herself did not react.

The lawyer waited, his hand out, for almost a full minute as the wind shook the trees and Ana’s nerves strained to the snapping point.

“Well, I don’t suppose it matters,” he said at length, letting his arm drop and smiling even wider. “I have just two more questions and as soon as you’ve answered them, we’ll just go on into the house and let your…Mr. Planchette, was it? Let Mr. Planchette proceed with this little farce whose outcome you’ve already decided. My first question, madam, is this. Are you aware that using your authority as city commissioner to harass a private citizen for any reason is a criminal offense? And secondly,” he continued even as Mrs. Rutter began to deny it, “that any criminal offense conducted against a person or property that is motivated in whole or in part by the offender’s prejudice against the victim’s age, race, sexual orientation, disability or religion, madam, is categorized under federal law as a hate crime?”

Mrs. Rutter frowned. She looked at the lawyer, then at Ana, and then at the camera as an awful realization supplanted the confusion in her eyes. The first cracks appeared in the invisible armor that she had worn all this time. “You can’t prove that,” she said and almost at once amended, “I haven’t done anything of the sort. That’s why you can’t prove it. I haven’t done anything!”

“There are two courts to consider in a situation like this one,” the lawyer replied smoothly. “The first being a court of law, where I am, admittedly, only about 50% certain the evidence of your harassment will lead to any kind of conviction, but where I am 100% certain you will be made the scapegoat and your termination will be item number one on my list of requirements for the settlement I am equally 100% certain will be coming my way. The other court is, of course, the court of public opinion, and there, madam, you are going to be _roasted_.”

Dark spots of color began to come in high in the other woman’s cheeks, making the rest of her face seem that much paler in much the same way that pressing her lips together only emphasized the trembling of her chin.

“You should be aware that, however things are here in Utah, most of the rest of the world views Mormonism as little better than a cult, and quite an unsavory one following the events in Colorado City. My first order of business once we go to trial will be to request a change of venue and as soon as I fill that jury box with non-Mormons, I will have an easy win. Of course, it may take quite a while before we get that far, but in the meantime, I promise you, it will be your face in the corner of the screen as my client gives interview after interview about the religious persecution she has experienced trying to save her family home. I will present you as equal parts Warren Jeffs and Kim Davis, and please believe me when I say I can have news crews and picket lines on the town hall green within the hour.”

“That is not—! You can’t—! I never—!” Mrs. Rutter shut her eyes tight, opened them blazing, and said, “That’s a lie. That’s perjury.”

“You would have to prove that,” the lawyer told her, still smiling. “Whereas I don’t imagine I’ll have to do much more than point out the fact, madam, the incontrovertible fact that the man whom you directed my client to contact if she wished to challenge the impending condemnation of her home—without an inspection or a hearing, let me again add, because I never tire of saying it—is not just a lawyer, but also a real estate agent.”

Ana did not flinch, but she might have squinted. She did something anyway, because Mrs. Rutter shot her a flustered, accusatory stare before she faced off against the lawyer again.

“In the last twenty years, you, madam, you personally have passed ordinances to condemn thirty-one homes and private businesses—”

“Those were entirely—”

“Please, let me finish. Where was I? Ah yes, thirty-one homes and private businesses, whereupon your Mr. Elliot, after no doubt helping your victims understand the hopelessness of their situation, managed somehow to purchase eleven of those properties back from the city of Mammon at clearance bin rates and then sell them at considerable personal profit, which if not an actual violation of law, would certainly seem to be a conflict of interest. Question. Did you perchance see any of that profit?”

“What? No!”

“Good, good, I’m sure my findings will support you when I subpoena your banking information. Out of curiosity, how many of your fellow commissioners are Mormon and how many of those persons whose homes and businesses you saw fit to condemn are not?”

“My faith has nothing to do with how I do my job!”

“Certainly its ethical teachings don’t appear to be affecting it much.”

“I will not be attacked for my religious beliefs!”

“But it’s quite all right to use them to attack others?”

“I never did! Never!”

“Then you have nothing to fear from me, madam,” he concluded, sweeping one arm broadly toward the porch. “Shall we go inside and commence the inspection? We’ll be filming it, of course. So I suggest you take notes on all of the issues you’ve been coached to find, Mr. Planchette, because you will be called upon to defend them in court.”

Mr. Planchette looked at Mrs. Rutter. Mrs. Rutter looked at Ana.

At length, Mrs. Rutter turned to the camera and said, “Is that on?” in a voice that only shook slightly.

“Has been the whole time,” said the puppy cheerfully.

“Good. I’d like to say something and I think I’d feel better knowing it’s recorded somewhere.” She closed her eyes, took a breath, opened them, and took three long steps toward Ana, stopping just in front of her. “Enjoy your home,” she said and, without any other warning, spit in her face and just as swiftly slapped it. It was not a hard blow, but Ana hadn’t been expecting it, and although she still didn’t flinch, she certainly staggered. “I hope you die in it,” Mrs. Rutter said, then turned on her matronly heel and went back to the car, slamming herself behind the wheel. 

Planchette awkwardly stood a moment longer, then went after her.

“Would you like to press charges?” the lawyer asked, still staring after the other woman in a wondering way.

Ana rubbed her cheek once to take away the spit and once again to smooth away the sting. “No.”

“Oh please.”

“No.”

Over by the car, Planchette had just straightened up from the window, looking flushed and uncomfortable. Mrs. Rutter stayed in the car, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. Even at this distance, Ana could see her shoulders shaking.

“No,” she said again. “If she’s done, then so am I. And she’s done.”

Planchette had rejoined them, clipboard in hand, his gaze darting from one to the other of them and mostly to the camera. “Look, I’m not sure what’s going on here,” he said, readying a pen with an air of doomed resolve, “but I’ve got a job to do here today and that’s what I’m going to do.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said the lawyer. 

“And I just want you to know, whatever it is that’s between you, that’s between you. I’m totally impartial here.”

“I’m very glad to hear it.”

“And just so you know, I have lots of friends who aren’t in the church. I mean, I’m not that guy. If you accept the gospel of Jesus Christ and abide by his teachings, there’s a place for you in the Celestial Kingdom.”

“I’m Jewish,” said the lawyer. “But please, keep talking.”

Planchette took that on the chin, but managed to rally. “Oh. Uh…Well, I have a few friends who, um…As long as your beliefs come from a Biblical—”

“I’m Wiccan,” said the puppy, grinning. “Whatcha got for me? A friend who read Harry Potter?”

The deer that Planchette had become turned into the headlights of Ana’s eyes and froze there.

She considered telling him she didn’t believe in any God at all, but took pity on him at the last second. It had been a bad enough day. “Let’s just get this over with,” she told him and watched as he fled. The puppy followed, camera in hand, but the lawyer stayed with Ana, as she’d known he would. 

“No mercy,” he said, watching Mrs. Rutter hunch over the steering wheel. “If she contacts you at all from this point on, you contact me immediately.”

“You had some information I would have liked to know.”

He took that in with a lawyerly shrug. “I thought you might let certain elements slip before I was ready to release them. I’ve represented Mr. Jakobson’s associates before. They don’t come heavily imbued with self-control, as a rule. But you…you never flinched. Be careful,” he went on evenly, turning away from the car to gaze at the impassive face of the house. “I don’t for one moment believe this has been a case of good old fashioned small-town bigotry. And that raises the question of just what her reasons for wanting you out of this house really are, because it is personal, I would stake my not inconsiderable reputation on it. That woman hates you.”

“I swear to you, I never met her before that day in Gallifrey’s and I haven’t seen her since. I was ten when I left this town. What could I have possibly done to her?”

“What a marvelous world this would be if hate were rational.”

“It was my aunt she hated, anyway. I’m only, what? Guilty by association?”

“Perhaps. But if she needed a reason to hate you for yourself alone, you gave her one today. It’s a beautiful house, beneath its scars,” he remarked, looking up at the watchful eye of the attic window. “But nothing I should want to call home. There is no quiet here.”

Ana huffed out a laugh. “I am miles past the edge of nowhere,” she told him. “There’s nothing but quiet here.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“Yeah, I know what you meant.” Ana pressed both hands briefly to her forehead and let them drop with a slapping sound to her hips. “Please tell me you’re not warning me to beware of hungry ghosts in the goddamn quarry.”

“I’m not,” the lawyer said without obvious offense. “I’m telling you to beware the ones in this house.”

“Come on,” said Ana, still doggedly holding on to that smile. “No, really, come _on_. There’s no such thing as ghosts or curses or any of that horror movie crap. This is the real world.”

The wind gusted, howling through the trees like souls in torment and stinking unmistakably of death.

“If you believe that,” the lawyer said when it subsided, “then I am truly afraid for you. However, it’s your house and you will be free to do what you will with it soon enough. My advice would be to have a rabbi bless either the bricks or the ashes, but that’s me.”

“I’ll think about it.” Shaking her head just in case he missed the sarcasm in her tone, Ana went inside. 

The lawyer did not follow her. At the time, if she thought about it at all, she thought only that he must be keeping an eye on Mrs. Rutter, making sure she didn’t slash anyone’s tires while they were all out of sight. Only later, taking a well-deserved joint on the roof and watching the clouds crawl across the moon, did she realize that, even after Mrs. Rutter and the inspector were long gone, he did not set foot in the house again.

“Ghosts,” she muttered and her mind went out over the desert, further than her eye could reach, not to the quarry and the bones of the miners long-buried beneath the rock and a hundred years of accumulated stormwater and sludge, but all the way to Freddy’s.


	18. Chapter 18

# CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

And just like that, it all came together.

The following Monday, Ana received her first official welcome: her copy of the inspection report, stating that conditions at the property were within parameters for the house to be safely inhabited, along with a notice from the post office not-so-politely reminding her to come in and fill out an address card for their records. While she was in town doing that, Ana dropped by the DMV and got a Utah’s driver’s license, then went home and celebrated by reshingling the roof. A week later, the woman from the Mammon Utility Board came out to connect her power and water, whereupon the basement flooded because the house had not been weatherized for twelve years. Replumbing took another week and as she was finishing that mess, the local storm god thought it would be funny to snap the top off a dead pine and hurl it through the garage door. All of this in addition to the cleaning, clearing, hauling and landscaping that she was not only now allowed to do, but obligated to do as a homeowner.

So she kept busy. But the one thing she did not do was unpack and move in.

She thought about it. She even took a box of clothes upstairs once, wandering up and down the hall for more than an hour with every intention of claiming a bedroom for her own. Not Aunt Easter’s and never David’s, but hell, there were six more, weren’t there? Some were even familiar to her, as if she’d played in them as a child, but she had no real memory and no special feeling for them.

It should have been a good thing. It wasn’t. Far from providing her with a refuge from the oppressive memories she found in every other corner of this house, the unknown quality of these guest rooms was itself repulsive. The somber colors painted on one set of walls had been someone’s choice, the commanding desk with heavy brass finishings had fit someone’s style. There were still memories here, lying as heavy as the dust over every surface, she just didn’t know whose they were. It was bad enough to share this house with the absence of her aunt and cousin; she couldn’t share it with strangers as well.

In the end, she took her box back outside and set up her tent. Sooner or later, she knew, she’d have to get over herself and move in, but not yet. She could eat in there, once she had replaced the appliances, installed new cabinets and bought new dishes. She could shower in there, not to mention all the other bathroom-related activities that came with indoor plumbing. She could probably watch TV or read a book or go dancing down the hall in her underwear, although she hadn’t tried yet. In fact, she was certain she could live in the house as long as she kept her eyes open while she did it. The thought of being asleep in there, helpless, oblivious…no. Not ever, maybe, but for damn sure, not yet.

And in the meantime, there were plenty of opportunities to distract herself.

On her one-month anniversary of what Ana considered her first ‘real’ day home, as she stood in the lumber yard behind Mammon’s only hardware store, mentally taking apart the porch and rebuilding it, she received her second official welcome, this one in the form of Lee Shelton manifesting at her elbow like Beelzebub himself, if Beelzebub wore saggy jeans and had to hitch at his belt to keep his devilish ass-crack from showing.

“Morning,” said Ana, moving a little further up the row.

He followed her. “Morning. Looking at lumber?”

‘Be nice,’ thought Ana. “Yeah.”

“Got some home repairs on your list?”

“Yeah.”

“I hear you finished up that job at the Kellar residence.”

“Yeah, a while ago.”

“How long it take you in the end?”

“Five weeks, three days, but they did the clean-up.”

“How much it cost?”

“You want to know, ask the client.”

“She says thirty-five.”

“Well, then?” said Ana, and it did come close, if one didn’t count the money she’d wasted buying gear for Mason’s boys or the cost of the materials that went into the lab-end of things.

“How long that kitchen take you?”

“About a week, once everything came in.”

“See, now—” Shelton stepped in front of her, hitching at his belt and frowning at her in a way that suggested it was the lying he found most hurtful. “—I find that hard to believe. Big Paulie—that’s my number two guy, forty years in the business and thirty of ‘em with me. Well, he had his wife take him ‘round on her Relief Society business, so he’s seen that kitchen with his own eyes and he told me it’d knock the socks off a centipede. Custom cabinets? Hand-laid tile?”

“Yeah, I know. I was there, building the cabinets and laying the tile.”

“You did all that? In one week?”

“That’s right.” She moved around him and continued looking at lumber, even though she was well away from the materials she could use on the porch. About sixteen miles away. Even if Hank’s Hardware had what she needed in stock, there wasn’t near enough of it. No matter what she did, she was going to end up driving to Hurricane.

Shelton stepped in front of her again, holding out his hand.

There were three crisp one-hundred dollar bills in it.

“You looking for a lap-dance, try the Wagon Wheel in Barlow,” Ana snapped. “What the hell do you want, man?”

“You told me if I gave you a weekend and three hundred dollars, you could make even my place look like someone competent worked there. I’m putting my money where your mouth is, little miss. You got three hundred dollars.” He fanned them out, folded them, and offered them up again. “And you got ‘till Monday morning.” He dug into his pocket with his free hand and came out with a freshly-cut key on a plain metal ring. “I like what I see and you got a job, missy. Full-time, medical and dental, the works.”

“If you don’t like what you see, what do I get then?”

He shrugged. “I’ll comp you day labor wages for three shifts.”

“What’s that, three-sixty? My ass!”

“You are about the only little lady I ever met turned up her nose at three hundred sixty dollars.” He nodded at her feet, still holding both keys and cash. “You could buy a hell of a nice pair of shoes for that.”

Ana closed her eyes until the urge to bury her boot in this man’s groin had passed. Then she opened them, took the money and said, “You got anywhere around here better than this to pick up materials? Three hundred isn’t going to go far if I’ve got to drive to Hurricane.”

“All business, aren’t you?” 

“I am when I’m working.” She took the keys from him and pocketed them with a scowl. “I appear to be working.”

“And when you aren’t?”

“Still worried about hiring on a scandal in a skirt?” Ana asked, knowing full well he wasn’t, at least not at the moment. Nevertheless it was both prudent and polite to give a man a dignified mode of escape, especially so when the man in question was soon to be her boss.

“Can’t be too careful with your reputation,” he said after some deliberation. “Your momma could have taught you that if she’d ever learned it herself.”

Ana checked her watch.

“There’s not a lot of folks around here that would give you the time of day, much less a job, after that little stunt you pulled. But I believe in giving folks a second chance,” he continued, hitching at his belt. “Like the chance I’m taking on you, little miss. Now I think you and I both know you’ve got an uphill hike ahead of you if you want to earn my respect. And I think you’re smart enough to know how you can make that hike easier.”

‘Here we go,’ thought Ana. She wondered if Rider would send her the same lawyer after she got her ass slammed in jail for kicking a man nut-first into the stratosphere or if he had another one with more specialized experience.

“You’re going to have to work twice as hard as any man on my crew just to prove you belong in it,” Shelton went on. “I expect you to look the other way when they look at you, pretend you don’t hear when they talk about you, and smile when they tell jokes you don’t find so funny. You do this for me, as well as keep your ankles crossed and your nose clean, and I’ll be happy to let you earn an honest wage, but you need to understand it’s my neck as much as it is yours. You can skip on back to wherever it is you’re from whenever you want—”

“I’m from Mammon,” said Ana.

“—but I have to live here,” he continued as if she’d never spoken, “with the consequences of your actions. You make me sorry I took you on, even once, and I’ll put you on the stoop like a yowling cat, missy, see if I don’t.”

“I understand,” she said as neutrally as she could. “Getting back to the issue of local sources for materials…?”

“Local? Well, you ought to get what you can here, show your community spirit and all that. Knew old Hank back when he ran the place and his boy needs all the help he can get, what with all them kids. But he don’t have much in either quantity or variety and frankly, I wouldn’t use this wood to build a chicken coop,” he said with a contemptuous glance around the yard. “I know you’re thinking of the Lowe’s, but I don’t recommend them for anything but tools and hardware. When it comes to the big jobs, you got to make friends.”

“Namely?”

“I suspect you’re thinking of your own house now and not the job you’ve been hired on to do.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, I don’t mind. There’s a budget flooring warehouse just up the road in St. George. For those who don’t think themselves too good for linoleum and laminate, they’re the folks to know.”

Her thoughts on the possibility of replacing the marble in her aunt’s foyer with linoleum must have showed on her face, because he took one look at her and waved the suggestion away like a fly. “For everything else, you’re better off hitting up the wholesaler’s strip in South Harrow. I got a guy for fixtures, a guy for appliances—they’re rebuilts, but just as good as new—a guy for windows and doors…hell, I got a guy just for lighting. Normally, I wouldn’t be quite so free with my trade secrets,” he allowed with a modest hitch at his belt. “But I’m expecting a hell of a return on my investment.”

“I’m not at the point of looking at lights and fixtures yet.”

“If it’s just the lumber you’re after, there’s a decent yard about fifteen miles south of here, on the road to Sierra, but you might want to bring a man with you if you go. The owner isn’t what you call progressive.” His eyes cut aside, mouth puckering as if a bad smell had blown between them—which with the wind coming in off the quarry, was in fact the truth—and said, “Of course, there’s Jackson’s Ranch in Warren. They’re in cahoots with damn near every big demolition company in four states. You can bet if a building goes down, Jackson’s is there first, taking everything good out before the ball swings.”

“What sort of salvage are we talking about?” asked Ana.

“Oh, lumber, fixtures, windows, doors—all that, sure, and damn good prices, but that’s not where he makes his money. That man will strip a building to its bones. Vintage moldings, columns, wall panels and ceiling tiles, even gargoyles once in a while. When they took out the old opera house in Grantsville, all the balconies ended up at Jackson’s. He got the fountain from the city square in Purview, the iron gate from that old Galloway ranch in Washow, and the spiral staircase from the cathouse in Leona. It’s that sort of place,” he concluded, no doubt thinking he hid his resentfulness well behind his scorn. “But only the common salvage is out in the public yard. All the good stuff will be in the back end and you’ll never get past the gate.”

“Sounds like the sort of place I ought to see,” said Ana, thinking again of those cracked marble tiles in the foyer, all the water-stained molding in the dining room and, irrelevantly, the stage at Freddy’s. “Where is it? Warren? That’s west of here, right?”

“Spitting distance of the border, but he don’t let just anyone in. I talked to him a time or two, but I’m not big money enough for his taste and it sure isn’t worth the gas to go all the way out there for used goods you can get brand new at South Harrow.”

Ana took out her phone and thumbed down through her contacts for Rider. “Jackson’s Ranch, did you say? Is that the actual name of the place or just the local color?”

“What did I just say to you, missy?” he asked with parental exasperation. “I’m not big enough for him and I do everything there is to do in the whole of Mammon. Nothing you say is going to impress him.”

Rider picked up. Shelton listened in with undisguised amusement as she gave him the pertinent details and asked him to do what he could, but she was careful to adjust the volume first so that when Rider said, “This is necessary to get you out of that house, right?” all Shelly heard was her answering, “Yeah.” 

“Let me see what I can do. Stay tuned.”

“Thanks.” Ana hung up, tossed Shelton’s keys in her palm a few times and finally pocketed them. “Let me just run home and grab a few things and I’ll meet you back at your place—your office,” she amended, seeing his ears prick up. “Take some measurements, look at some pictures, get the preliminaries out of the way. Sound good?”

Shelton made a production of checking his watch and his phone, tapping impressively at the screen of what was clearly not a smartphone with a touchscreen before putting it away. “I got a little more time to give you today, but you better hustle your bustle,” he warned, already moseying away. “I’m giving you my lunch hour, little miss. I can’t afford to let your preliminaries eat into my entire work day.”

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” Ana promised and she was. It meant driving a cautious two miles under the limit as far as Cawthon, then ramping it up Edge of Nowhere and flying past Freddy’s in a plume of road dust, taking Old Quarry like a demon up the steep mountain turns all the way to her aunt’s house. She left the motor running as she tore through her tools, slid across the burning hood and jumped back behind the wheel, then tore ass back to Cawthon and meandered into town again. 

When she walked into the office of Shelton Contractors, the man himself was leaning up against the counter and looking at his watch.

“Twenty-two minutes, six seconds,” he said.

“Had to stop for gas,” she replied, looking around. In her mind, she had already stripped away the old paneling and that cheap counter and was hard at work setting up a reception area with some power to impose and impress. Three days wasn’t much, but then, neither was the office. One day to clear, one day to build, one day for the three Ps. She’d be working some long hours, but she had no doubt it would be done and ready for review on Monday morning.

Shelton watched her take out her tablet and laser-tape with a disdain that badly concealed his interest. “I haven’t noticed as them time-savers save much in the way of time and they sure don’t save much money.”

“You’re buying the wrong ones,” said Ana, turning her tablet on and tapping the camera app. 

“Surprised you don’t have one of those in your phone,” he remarked as she took the first picture.

“I do, but the resolution’s better on the tablet.”

“And to think I’ve been doing this for thirty years without any kind of camera at all.”

“You can do it without electricity too, but it sure makes the job easier.” She took a last shot of the coffee corner, opened her roombuilder program, brought the photos over, and pointed her laser-tape out into the room.

“What is that?”

“Modern man’s measuring tape,” she replied, thumbing the button. Numbers lit up on the little screen almost immediately. Ignoring Shelly’s scornful laugh, she tapped them into the roombuilder and took another measurement. When she had them all—length, width, height, one window, three doors—she hit the magic button and the roombuilder rendered them together into a mesh. One by one, Ana dragged her photos onto the box and in another few seconds, the program generated a virtual copy of the room in which she and Shelton, no longer smirking, stood. At this point, she would normally stop, but he was an ass, so she took the time to edit out the furniture, highlight the measurements, and open a sidebar for notes, all while he was watching and all in less than a minute. 

“You got all the latest toys, huh?”

“I try to stay competitive.”

“It’s a bunch of useless crap, if you ask me.” Shelton hitched again at his belt, eyeing the tablet covetously, then said, “Tell you what. You want to get a jumpstart on this job, why don’t you just hop on up in my truck and I’ll take you out to the lumberyard in Sierra? When that old dog sees you’re with me, he won’t give you any trouble the next time you drop in, even if you should go on your lonesome. How’s that?”

Ana’s phone rang. She answered, listened, thanked Rider, hung up and said, “No thanks, looks like I’m driving out to Warren.” And then, because she knew when Monday morning rolled around, she’d be working for this fool, she added, “But if you want to hop on up in my truck, I’ll let you ride along. Maybe once he sees you’re with me, he won’t give you any trouble the next time you drop by.”

# * * *

Bonnie’s internal clock told him the time and the day of the week, but that was all. He didn’t know the year and could only guess at the month. Hell, it had been so long since he’d seen a calendar, he was no longer certain how the months lined themselves up. All the –bers went together, he knew that, and the two that ended in –ary went back to back too, but he also remembered March came before May, so did that mean all the ones beginning with the same letters went in alphabetical order? If so, that meant February, January, July, June…but no, that couldn’t be right, because Chica had a song about April showers and May flowers, and if he was right about the alphabet, then March came before May and April came before August. 

Nevertheless, he could keep a calendar of sorts through the seasonal songs that came and went in his act, but summer was a thin season for those sorts of songs. He knew it was summer, because there had been more and more kids coming by, drinking and smashing bottles on the loading dock and touching up the tits and dicks on those less-than-flattering portraits they kept painting on the back wall, and he knew it wasn’t July, because none of them had fireworks yet. And that was all he knew. Exactly how many days it had been since Ana had left him on the loading dock and driven away without looking back, he couldn’t even guess. Freddy didn’t want him scratching up the walls the way Foxy used to do when he was out of order back at Circle Drive and it was too easy to lose track of the days when they were all the same. His body was all machinery; his brain was a deep feedforward neural network that was only part of a systolic array itself contained within the physical dimensions of his endoskeleton’s skull; his memory, still human and fallible. He could not record one second of their time together to keep with him. That took software he’d never been given. He had only the same fleeting moments any man had, and the knowledge that every day he’d forget a little more.

She’d come back. She’d said she wouldn’t, but she’d said that before and she’d come back. Sure, okay, she’d been high and sick or something and hadn’t meant to, but she’d done it. Sometimes, Bonnie liked to think that meant something more than if she’d been coming every day. If she was drawn to him against her will, that was a far more powerful draw than just killing time in an abandoned building out of habit, the way older kids used to kill time at Freddy’s after school. Sometimes Bonnie liked to think it meant she truly felt something for him, as ridiculous as he knew that to be.

And other times, Bonnie thought he should have kissed her goodbye when she offered, because he was never going to get another chance.

This was one of those times. The time between closing and the top of the next hour when he was free to move around was always one of those times. It was always dark in the restaurant, but it was never darker than that first hour after sundown, when his eyes were shut and even lighting them up only showed him the painted black backing of his eyelids. There was nothing to do but stand there, holding his stupid guitar, head down and ears drooping forward, waiting out the time. Nothing to listen to except his and Chica’s fans going.

And Freddy on patrol, Bonnie mentally amended as the loading dock door rattled and banged down in the back room, shortly followed by the distinctive sound of Freddy’s footsteps in the kitchen.

He was moving faster tonight than he usually did.

And he didn’t head up the East Hall as his usual route would have been. Neither did he pass through the dining room to check the defenses in the gift shop or go out through the West Hall door to glare at the giant hole Bonnie had left in the West Exit. He came directly to the stage and climbed the stairs.

‘What’s wrong?’ Bonnie thought, as hard as he could, but of course, he could say nothing, do nothing. He could only listen as Freddy took his place in the center of the stage, and then the slowing of Freddy’s various mechanical processes as he pretended to shut down.

Into this new quiet, Bonnie heard the rumbling of an engine. Not just any engine, but one that had become too familiar. 

‘Wake me up,’ thought Bonnie. ‘Wake me up! Come on, what the fuck, man? Wake me up! It’s Ana!’

But Freddy knew. He had to know, had to have recognized the truck as it turned in, or he’d be waking them all up now to defend themselves against attack. So he knew, but he did nothing, pretending at the after-hours protocol he alone was not bound by, as the truck rolled right up to the side of the building and parked.

Bonnie strained, hammering at the code that held him, but it remained as it had always been, immutable. He might go black, but he would never break it.

The West Hall door scraped open. Footsteps, light and quick as only a human’s could be, crunched across the floor and stopped somewhere in the middle of the room.

“Oh,” said Ana, his Ana. “I thought…You in there, my man?”

He was, but he couldn’t answer.

After a moment, her footsteps moved away into the other hall and receded.

It was 9:41. Nineteen more minutes.

‘She’ll wait,’ he thought. ‘Please wait. Damn you, Freddy, wake me up!’

The only thing Freddy did was turn his head, too loud in the silence of Ana’s wake, then turn back and resume the slumped posture of a dormant animatronic as she returned, passing straight through the dining room without stopping.

‘No,’ thought Bonnie. ‘Don’t go! Just wait! Please, just give me time!’

The West Hall door opened and shut over the broken tiles.

She was gone.

Bonnie listened. If he had lungs, he would have held his breath. If he had a real heart, it would have raced. He had neither. He did nothing.

She came back and again stood for a time in the middle of the room. Again she moved away. There was a rustle of plastic as she collected one of the garbage bags from underneath the table where she had slept, then other sounds, less obvious, that Bonnie realized were her picking up all the empty water bottles she’d left behind. And other stuff besides. Cleaning up. Killing time, maybe, waiting for him to wake up.

When the bag was full, or at least when she stopped putting things in it, she took it away with her, out to the truck.

Servos hummed as Freddy first lifted his head, then dropped it.

She was longer coming back this time, long enough that he was sure the next sound he heard would be the truck’s engine as she drove away. When the door opened instead, he could feel the darkness behind his eyelids going darker yet, dragging him toward the black.

‘I’m calm,’ he thought and tried to be. If he went black now, if she waited, if she was still here when his time was up and he was in the black…

“I thought you’d be up by now,” she said, so close. Grabbing range. Biting range. “It’s way later than it was the last time…Is it because it’s Sunday? Do you just never wake up on Sundays?”

‘No! I mean, yes! I mean, just wait! Ana, wait! Give me ten minutes! Ten minutes! What’s that? That’s half an act! That’s two songs and a dance! That’s nothing!’

“I guess I should have expected that,” Ana said with a laugh. “Nothing else in this stupid town is open on Sunday. I don’t even know why I came here. It made sense at the time. And no, before you ask, I’m not high. Thinking that you wanted to know or even could want to know how it all shook out for me was actually a sober thought.”

Nine minutes.

“Anyway. So, I passed my inspection. I get to keep the house. Everyone in town is super-thrilled about that,” she added with edged humor and laughed. “Someone put a postcard under my windshield when I was in the grocery store last week. It had a beautiful picture of Mammon Canyon on the front and someone had written James 1:15 on the other side. I had to Google it.” A few electronic tones sounded as she presumably did something on her phone. In a theatrical voice that made it clear she was reciting, she intoned, “‘Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’ Funny, huh? That’s the most creative way I’ve been called a bastard yet. I framed that fucker and hung it on the wall. Fuck them. I’m not leaving.”

Seven minutes.

“I got a job,” Ana announced, too cheerfully after the defiant way she’d ended her last statement. “It’s not official quite yet, but it’s a sure thing, all right. Starting tomorrow, I will be working with the pre-eminent contractor for the entire city of Mammon. Doesn’t that just get your panties wet? All it cost me was a weekend’s practically free labor and the most obnoxious road trip in the universe. Seriously, stuck in the truck with that ass for two hours out and two hours back. He kept turning the A/C up and then adjusting the rearview because he said the glare was killing his eyes. Like I don’t notice you’re aiming it at my tits, you perv. And we spent almost three hours at the salvage yard, so yeah, it’s barely seven o’clock on the road home and he starts hinting how late it is and we should get a motel. What a creep. The worst part is, he doesn’t just come right out and say, you know, what would you do for a Klondike bar, he just dances around it for a while and then goes into his keep-your-nose-clean-and-your-ankles-crossed-little-missy routine.”

She lapsed into silence once more. Five minutes now. The humming of his CPU changed pitch as it ran the night’s maintenance program and cleared away the past twenty-four hour’s errors from the log preparatory to powering up for the night. Bonnie tried again to twitch, open his eyes, send even a burst of static through his speakers; nothing.

“I shouldn’t be telling you any of this,” she said and laughed, not very happily. “I shouldn’t even be here. Granted, I shouldn’t have left all that trash, not to mention my sleeping bag, but I really shouldn’t have come back. I just…wanted…to talk to you.”

‘Me, too,’ he thought desperately. ‘Just wait, okay? It’s not even three whole minutes. Just wait!’

“Why can’t I just make a clean break with you? I must have left a thousand places in my life. I ought to be good at it by now. I never let myself get drawn in again when I know it’s no good. You believe that? Never. But I just keep coming back to you.”

To you, she said. Not here, not to Freddy’s. To you.

“And I can’t,” she said.

Less than two minutes now.

“I’m okay. If you can hear me…if you ever wondered…” She moved a step closer. A shuddery rasp of skin on plastic; she’d touched him, somewhere. “If you never see me again, just know that I’m all right.”

One minute. One.

“Goodbye, Bonnie.”

No.

He thought it as she walked away, mentally shouted it as the West Hall door creaked open and groaned shut, and then just silently screamed as the rest of his time counted down, second by endless second.

Nine o’clock.

Bonnie’s eyes snapped open. He threw his guitar behind him and leapt off the stage, shattering his worn right shin-casing and exposing the metal bones there from knee to ankle. His left knee locked up, the crankshaft sending out yet another stress warning he could do nothing about, but he freed it with a wild punch and ran for the door as fast as his broken body could move.

Not fast enough. The West Hall was empty.

He lurched on anyway, grabbing at the wall for balance he could not wait to find for himself, hoping against hope that she’d still be there—

In the parking lot, twin headlights switched on, throwing knives of light into the hall through the boarded windows. 

“Wait-t-t!” Bonnie yelled, just as the truck’s engine roared to life…and then receded.

Lights sliced left to right as the truck turned, then winked out as she drove away.

He reached the door just in time to see the red spark of her taillights disappear around the building. Bonnie gripped the pushbar, leaned on it…but didn’t smash through it. As he watched, the truck descended the access road and turned onto the paved one. Greenish light from the dashboard showed him the broad lines of her profile, but no more than that. She didn’t look back, didn’t slow down. She was gone.

Footsteps in the hall behind him, slow and dragging. They stopped well out of arm’s reach.

“I hate you,” said Bonnie. 

No explanations. No excuses. No answer.

Bonnie turned away from the door, careful not to look at Freddy or even catch him in the periphery of his camera’s range, because the black was right there. Those taillights were still out there, climbing into the foothills and then on to the mountain, but he couldn’t see them anymore. He could barely see Tux, except as blobs of white floating in a much greater darkness. If he had to see Freddy’s face right now, the effort it would take to keep the black from taking him would surely cause enough fatal exceptions to make it happen anyway, so Bonnie started walking the only way he could go, with Freddy filling up the fucking hall, into Pirate Cove.

There was eyelight down by the stage, dimly perceived through the thickening black. Bonnie ignored it. He kept his head down and his feet moving, trying to outrun the anger in a body that couldn’t outrun a goddamn snail, and when he had reached a level of calm that allowed him to switch on his own eyes, he found himself in the Treasure Maze, just outside the mermaid’s grotto.

He’d brought her here on her first night. She’d kissed him, his first kiss. _I’m the one that got away,_ she’d said. _I’m going to get away again if you’re not careful._

And she had.

Rage swelled, mindless, a shriek he felt in his metal bones, bringing with it all the promise of the terrible relief and, yes, ecstasy that could only be found in the black.

Then it was gone, winking out like taillights on a mountain road.

He opened the hidden door and went inside.

His eyes splashed over the dirty glass of the mermaid’s window, reflecting his own cracked face more than it illuminated the tableau beyond. It was a better mirror than the mirror in the boy’s bathroom, that was for sure, but now that he could see it, he was unavoidably confronted with the fact that it was a stupid face. A big, bulky, stupid, ugly, broken _bunny_ face. He’d lived years without it, wanting it back, thinking it made him who he was and not having it made him nothing. And he was right. Because here it was back again. But all it made him…was Bonnie the Bunny.

The foam-covered door of the grotto swung slowly open. Two small lights appeared in the glass, one dirty white and one dirty yellow.

“Fuck off,” said Bonnie dully, then turned his head and said, almost immediately afterward, “Did he send-d-d you?”

Foxy shook his head and, with a slight rolling of his eyes, admitted, “Chica. But I’ll fuck-k-k right off if ye want me to. I d-d-don’t know what in the bleeding heck she th-th-th—THAR SHE BLOWS—thinks ye want-t-t to hear from me.”

Bonnie looked back into his reflection’s face. His stolen eyes. His fat bunny cheeks, all the fuzz scraped off and made shiny by layers of shellac. His big bunny nose that wasn’t even a real nose, just a hackysack ball, painted black and smooshed down. His long ears, hinged in the middle so they could flop comically around with his moods. At the moment, they hung open in a wide V and drooped backwards; he was sad.

“Ye c-c-can’t be mad at Freddy,” said Foxy at length. “I reckon I can understand-d-d why ye would be, but it ain’t-t-t right, ye know. Leaving aside his reasons, and-d-d they be damned good ones, this ain’t-t-t no kind o’ place for her.”

“I know.”

“Besides, like as not, she’ll be b-b-back anyway, so b-b-buck up.”

“Sure.”

Foxy turned around, but didn’t go. After a few seconds, he looked back. “Yer j-j-just trying to get rid o’ me, ain’t ye?”

“Here’s hoping.”

Foxy folded his arms, watching him, then finally, bluntly said, “Ye ought-t-t to be g-glad she’s gone.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m d-d-dead serious, bucko. Ye want t-t-to see her?”

He was being baited and he knew it. The only way to win would be to keep quiet, but Bonnie could only manage a staticky second or two before he swung around, his hands in fists. “Yeah, I d-d-do! So what?”

“And if she’d stayed-d-d tonight, ye’d want her to stay?”

“Yes!”

“Sleep over, maybe.” Foxy raised his hand and hook in a placating gesture even as Bonnie advanced on him in the small space. “I mean it j-j-just like it sounds, mate. Ye want-t-t to see her sleeping. Ye want to have every moment ye c-c-can, even if she ain’t doing nothing but laying-ing there. Ye want to hear the sounds she makes, see them little t-t-twitches when she’s d-d-dreaming. Ye want to see her open her eyes and see ye and close ‘em again because she knows she’s safe with ye.” He paused, his head cocking, and showed Bonnie all his teeth in a grin. “Of course, if she wanted-d-d to cuddle and k-k-kiss on ye first, that’d be fine too. I sure wouldn’t kick her out o’ me berth for eating-ing weevily sea biscuits.”

“Fuck you,” Bonnie said again. “What your p-point, Foxy? Just spit it out!”

“I want ye to think-k-k, that’s all. I ain’t saying ye shouldn’t feel what yer feeling, just saying that f-f-feeling without thinking’s as hare-brained as thinking without feeling.”

“Hare-b-b-brained,” said Bonnie, rolling his eyes. “I get it.”

“Unintentional.”

“Sure it was.”

“Why do ye want-t-t to see her, eh? Does she really make ye so bleeding happy? Here? In this place? Not-t-t with but one layer of cage between ye and _him_ , can she make ye set-t-t it all aside and just be happy?”

“Yes.”

Foxy nodded, like the answer and the belligerent tone in which it was delivered were both what he expected to hear. He said, “Can ye make her happy? Here? Can ye make her forget-t-t the dark and the mold and the mess and be happy with ye?”

Bonnie lifted his head defiantly even as he further flattened his ears. “Yes.”

Foxy nodded again. “Can ye k-k-keep her safe? Ye may want her more than anything-ing, aye, and ye may think that’s love, but I says if ye don’t want her safe even more than ye want her with ye, it ain’t.”

Bonnie stood his ground, but he ended up looking at the mermaid instead of Foxy’s level mismatched stare.

“She ain’t safe here,” said Foxy’s ghost in the glass. “No one is and her least-t-t of all, because she’s high more’n she ain’t and even when she’s on an even keel, she ain’t-t-t got the good sense God gave a sand flea. She thinks I d-d-done her cousin-chap in, aye, and there’s a part of her still thinks it-t-t, for all she may say different. I sees it in her eye and hears it in her voice, but she _still_ came right-t-t in that night to sit with me and chat with me and sleep, aye, r-r-right there at the foot of the stage. She wouldn’t fear to d-d-do the same even if me eyes were full black—MANE, ME MORTAL ENEMY. Hell, if she saw me t-t-trying to shake it off, she’d c-c-come right up and put her hand on me, tell me she wouldn’t.”

“I’d never hurt-t-t her.”

“Aye, ye would,” Foxy said implacably. “We all would-d-d, under the right circumstances. Ye c-c-can’t even tell her what the danger is. Rule Twenty-Five, eh? Ye can’t even spit-t-t out a word o’ warning without going black. Think on that, mate. Ye’d be as like to do her in yerself just-t-t trying to keep her clear o’ _him._ ”

“I wouldn’t have to,” Bonnie said. “He can’t g-g-get out.”

“Oh aye? Bet-t-t your life on it? Bet hers?”

Bonnie’s fan revved once. He did not answer.

“Right. G-Gave it me best sh-sh—SHOT ACROSS THE BOW.” Foxy again started to leave. After one step, however, he just stopped and stood in the narrow hall beyond the grotto chamber. “At least she c-c-came to see ye. She went r-r-right past the Cove. Four times. D-Didn’t even say hello, much less g-g-goodbye.”

“Yeah, well, at least-t-t she’s gone and that-t-t’s all that matters, r-r— _RIGHT FOOT IN_ —right?” Bonnie asked caustically. “You ought t-t-to be g-g-glad.”

“Ye think-k-k I don’t want to see her?” Foxy turned all the way around, ears flat and eyelight dimmed by lenses that were open too far. “Ye think-k-k yer the only one, eh?”

“Hey, you’re the one-one— _LITTLE FROGGIE ONE_ —one who said she shouldn’t-t-t be here.”

“She shouldn’t,” Foxy said curtly. “One th-thing ain’t nothing to the other.”

“K-K-Kind of like how what you’re saying-ing-ing now has nothing to do with what-t-t you think of her.”

Foxy’s reflection in the glass cocked its head. One ear ticced. “Ye don’t-t-t know what I think of her.”

“Yeah, b-b-because you’ve been _so_ unopinionat-t-ted.”

Foxy nodded again, looking away into the corner of the small chamber just like there was something there to look at. “I were wrong. Is that-t-t what ye want to hear?”

“I don’t c-c-care what you say.”

“Ye want me to g-go?” 

“I don’t care what-t-t you do.”

“Ye…want to…” Foxy visibly steeled himself. “Talk about it?”

“With _you?_ ” 

“Aye, that b-b-be asking a bit much,” Foxy muttered, rubbing at his chin with the curved side of his hook as he thought. “Well…just talk, then. Pretend-d-d I ain’t here.”

Bonnie shook his head, but Foxy didn’t leave, and after several minutes of thickening silence, Bonnie said, “One minute, Foxy. Th-That’s all I needed-d-d. One more minute.”

“And she left ye.”

“Of c-c-course she left-t-t me!” Bonnie snapped. “Why the hell would-d-d she wait-t-t around all night-t-t? God! You don’t g-g-get it.”

“No, I don’t. Why are ye mad at Freddy? Ye know d-d-damn well what could happen. Say he broke ye out and ye went-t-t black, and why the hell are ye shaking yer head at me?” Foxy demanded. “Don’t act-t-t like that ain’t never happened! Freddy were only being smart-t-t. Someone ought to b-b-be and where she’s concerned, that-t-t sure ain’t you!”

“Thanks. Great talk-k. You can g-g-go now.”

“Look, all I be saying is, ye can’t b-b-blame Freddy for her leaving.”

“The hell I c-c-can’t! Why didn’t-t-t he b-br-break me out? He let me s-st-stand there like a…a fucking-ing-ing d-d-doll! He let-t-t her walk away when he _knew_ she’d-d-d never b-b-be back!”

“I heard ‘never be back’ out of her three times over now. Buck up. She’ll b-b-be back. She’s yer girl, remember?” 

“Yeah,” said Bonnie, staring into the ghost of his big, dumb face. “She’s my g-g-girl. And I’m her wubby.” 

Foxy eyed him with open apprehension tinged by grudging curiosity. “Never heard-d it called that before.”

“Come on, fifty years at this job and you d-d-don’t know what a wubby is?” Bonnie glanced back, then turned all the way around. “You ever see a kid-d-d come here with a toy? Not a Fazbear toy, but, like, one of their own? Their favorite toy, the one they can’t go anywhere without. A p-pl-plushie. A doll. Hell, a fire truck. You know what-t-t I mean?”

“Aye, so?”

“And they sit the thing at the table and p-p-pose it so it can see the stage and watch the show. They get an extra slice of p-p-pizza for it or try to wheedle out an extra cupcake for it, because ‘Princess Tinklebottom’ is hungry too. They love it-t-t and they think they need it, but they have no problem carrying-ing-ing it around by the ankle or banging it into walls, because as much as they say otherwise, they know it’s not-t-t real. They talk to it and sometimes talk back-k-k for it or sometimes just act like they’re the only ones who can hear it, but if one of them ever t-t-talked back, like, for real, they would run screaming-ing from the goddamn room, because kids may love to play pretend, but they’re not c-cr-crazy and they’re not stupid. They know what’s real.” Bonnie looked at his reflection. “And what isn’t.”

“And the point-t-t—O’ ME SWORD—o’ this charming speech is?”

“The point is, at the end of the d-d-day, they know damn well that thing-ing isn’t alive. The point is, they outgrow it. They may keep it anyway or they may throw it out-t-t or just leave it behind somewhere, like the dozens and dozens of wubbies that get left here and never reclaimed. The point is,” Bonnie said heavily, “Ana knows I’m not-t-t real.”

Foxy blew out a hard gust of hot air through his joints. “Ye know, yer g-g-going to wake up out o’ this pity-party t-t-tomorrow and be damned ashamed o’ yerself, as ye bleeding well ought to be. Wubby, me furry ass. Ye know she likes ye.”

“Yeah. She _likes_ me. She talks to me and she plays with me and I’m sure she’d g-g-grab an extra cupcake if Chica still made them. I’m her favoritest t-t-toy ever,” Bonnie said, twisting the knife, “but she knows I’m not real and sooner or later, she’ll stop coming back. She’ll get too busy or she’ll be too tired or whatever she tells herself when she drives by, but the truth is, she’ll outgrow me. And one day, years from now, she’ll be sitting-ing-ing in some other restaurant with her human friends, talking about their exes, and she’ll mention me and it’ll be a j-j-joke.”

“Bonnie—”

“She’ll smile when she’s telling them how we had our own song and how we danced and how she k-k-kissed me…and they’ll all laugh, and do you know why?” Without waiting for an answer, Bonnie spat, “Because it’s _funny!_ ”

“Bon, d-d-don’t.”

“Look at me!” Bonnie turned, punching at the glass, but it was the same as the window upstairs in the manager’s office—made to hold monsters. The only mark he left was a smudgy place where his knuckles took away the dust. “I’m a fucking b-b- _bunny!_ Nothing I feel makes any g-g-goddamn difference when everything I d-d-do, I have to do with _this_ body! Everything-ing I say…” His fist rose, trembled, opened. He touched the glass, the tiny joints complaining at the strain as he splayed his fingers and stared between them into his reflection. “…has to come out of that mouth.”

Foxy scratched along the side of his muzzle, looking everywhere but at Bonnie. 

“I’m not mad at her. How could-d-d I be? I’m silly, Foxy,” said Bonnie, staring into his stolen eyes. “I love her and I can’t do anything-ing-ing about it, because everything I do…is silly.”

Foxy pulled in a deep breath, then took Bonnie by the shoulder and turned him around so they were face to face. “Ye ain’t-t-t a plushie. Ye ain’t a fire t-tr-truck. And more importantly, she ain’t a bloody k-k-kid. I seen that g-g-girl sick and sober and strung out-t-t to the moon and back, and it don’t matter. When I talk-k-k to her, she don’t do nothing but listen and t-t-talk back. So stow that wubby talk—and that be a stupid word, by the way. What ye look like, that d-d-don’t matter to her. It should,” he added archly, “but it don’t. Ye know who ye are to her? Eh? You’re B-Bonnie.”

“The Bunny,” he said morosely.

“Aye, that’s right,” said Foxy, looking annoyed. “You’re Bonnie the Bunny, the one and bleeding only. She may not-t-t think of ye as a man, but she surely knows yer real. And if ye want her to think yer a man—” He let go of Bonnie’s shoulder to give him a careful swat upside the head. “—bleeding well act like one! Get in there, mate! Scrape that bow for barnacles! What the hell are ye waiting for?”

He meant it to be encouraging. Bonnie knew it and still anger opened up in him like a black lens. “Don’t t-t-talk about her like that.”

Foxy rolled his eyes. “Hell, man, I d-d-don’t mean—”

“And don’t-t-t you tell me to…to swab her fucking-ing deck like that’s being a man! She’s amazing! She’s the most-t-t amazing…Jesus Christ-t-t, why am I even talking to you? You d-d-don’t know the first fucking thing about her or me! Fuck-k-k off!”

Foxy shrugged and turned around. Then just stood there. “Ye know, the night she fixed-d-d ye up,” he said suddenly and fell silent again.

Against his will, Bonnie glanced at him.

Foxy caught it, scowled, and shook his head. “Never mind. Fucking off. Enjoy yer sulk, mate.” Again, he made it as far as the hall, only to stop just outside the grotto and stare into the wall. He muttered, scratched at his muzzle, then looked down and ran the point of his hook along the topmost of the scars on his chest, and finally turned around. “The night she c-c-came to see me in the C-Cove,” he said, resolute as a man facing down a firing squad, “she asked me if I were t-t-tired of talking like a p-p-pirate.”

“So?” 

“First t-t—TIME TO SET SAIL—time I were ever asked-d-d.”

The room was too small to move any farther away, so Bonnie just turned to the glass, hoping Foxy would take the damn hint and leave him alone.

“The k-k-kids, ye know, sometimes they t-t-talk at ye like yer real, because ye are, to them. Not like the dolls they carries around, like ye say, b-b-by the ankles. We…can really walk. Really talk. And to the wee ones, that b-b-be all the difference. We _are_ real to them. They believe the t-t-tales I tell. They believe I be a real p-p-pirate.” Foxy’s reflection nodded toward him. “And yer a real rock s-st-star. Aye. Now the older set-t-t, they’ll talk at ye like to mock ye, showing each other up to see who c-c-can be the biggest b-b-b—BILGERAT—brat about it. Any older than that-t-t and they either be talking to t-t-tickle themselves or to prove to their young’uns we be real, same as they t-t-talk to Santa Claus at the m-mall. And all of ‘em, every one, they’re either talking at ye like they think-k-k yer real or like they know ye ain’t-t-t, but not her. ‘How sick of that-t-t song are ye?’ she asked me,” Foxy mused, looking up and away like he could see through floors and time both and watch it all play out again. “Like I were a man p-playing a part, like I c-c-could put it aside. She called me C-Captain, not like the kiddies do, like it were all I am and they be jollying up to join me crew, but like it were a joke just-t-t between us. She’s a fine thing, ain’t she?”

Bonnie looked narrowly back at him, but Foxy appeared to be serious. 

“Aye, she is. I called-d-d ye a fool for saying ye loved-d-d her. I had no call to say it, nor even t-t-to think it. She is a fine thing.” Foxy pushed himself off the doorway and joined Bonnie at the glass, pretending to be studying the mermaid in the grotto. “But she shouldn’t-t-t be here and if ye really loved-d-d her, ye’d know it. No, I never b-b-been in love. I’m about-t-t the least qualified-d-d in the whole of this b-b-building to lecture ye on it, and that includes them what’s locked-d-d up belowdecks. But inex-ex—X MARKS THE SPOT—expert as I am, I know this ain’t-t-t no place for fine things. Betwixt what’s above us and what’s b-b-below ain’t nothing but a mess and more monsters. Ye should-d-d want her clear of it. I said it before and I’ll say it-t-t again, if’n ye d-d-don’t want her safe more than ye want her with ye, it ain’t love.”

He had no answer, so he said, “She’s g-g-gone.”

“Aye, well, she’ll be b-b-back. Freddy’s best-t-t efforts and her own best interest aside, she’ll b-b-be back. And ye, ye tosser…” Foxy’s impatient tone faltered. One eye, the yellow one, flickered. “Yer the one she’s c-c-coming back to see.”

They looked at each other. Bonnie couldn’t tell what Foxy was thinking. Hell, he couldn’t even tell what he was thinking, but the thoughts, whatever they were, did not sit quiet in his head.

“I’ll t-t-tell Chica ye’ll be right up and ye’d better not make a liar of me. She’s worried-d-d about ye,” Foxy said gruffly and left.

Alone, Bonnie looked back one last time at the dirty window and his own faint reflection hovering ghost-like above the mermaid, slumped and silent in her wilted bed of plastic seaweed. His eyes, Brewster-green, stared back at him, into him. 

_You’re very handsome when you smile._

He smiled. Anyone else looking at him would have seen just his lower jaw drop an inch, showing off the white pegs of his outer teeth, but it was a smile and Ana would have known it.

His gaze dropped. He found himself staring at the smudgy marks just under his chin where that big stupid bowtie used to be. With a little imagination, they could almost be fingerprints, left when she’d opened him up to write her name on his heart.

He wished he could see it.

On impulse, Bonnie reached out one of his few intact fingers and traced three letters over his reflection’s chest, not so much drawing in the dust as carving through it. Just a few peaks and lines, up and down, left to right. Like a heartbeat. A-N-A.

He felt better. Not a lot. Just a little. But better.

Bonnie turned his back on the mermaid and limped out of the grotto into the maze. The hidden door on its rusted spring wheezed shut in stutters, but ultimately, there was silence.

A minute passed.

In the dark, unseen, the torn blankets of spiderwebs draping the mermaid’s airless cave fluttered as if caught in a breeze. Two pinpoints of light flickered on amid the foam stalactites. They shone silver, illuminating only the pale edges of the eyesockets of its mask.

For a long time, there was nothing more, no movement, no sound. Then, all at once, the eyes swept in from its lurking place in the ceiling at the back of the cave and right up to the glass, close enough that their light succeeded in reflecting a ghostly image of its own porcelain face—bone white, save for the painted tracks of tears pouring from its eyes to its gaping, grinning mouth.

The wall separating the mermaid’s enclosure from the grotto was tungsten carbide alloy and the window, four inches of Lucite, but the small chute through which the cursed treasure of Captain Fox dropped into the waiting hands of children was closed off by nothing more than a hinged metal flap, and sound traveled freely. If Bonnie had still been standing in the grotto, he could have heard the Puppet humming to itself as easily as it had heard him talking. And Ana, if she’d been there, might have had one of those thunderclap moments and remembered the song:

_My grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf  
So it sat ninety years on the floor…_

Still humming, its eyes shifted from the door of the maze to the letters in the dust on the glass. It lifted one long, black, boneless finger and touched the pointed tip to the lowest leg of the letter A. It tapped the glass thoughtfully—tick tock, tick tock—then swiftly turned and bounded across the grotto. There was a door hidden in the back wall, but like all doors on this level of the building, it was sealed and impossible to open without power. The Puppet never gave it a glance. It leapt up to the ceiling once more, passing through and around the stalactites as nimbly as any spider, to the vent that had once provided the strong breeze that made all the plastic kelp and crepe-paper seaweed flutter as if in underwater currents. The opening was no more than ten inches in diameter; the widest point of the Puppet’s body, only eight. 

It passed through and vanished, leaving only another gentle wake to stir the spiderwebs that no one was there to see.

# * * *

End of Part One: Girl on the Edge of Nowhere

To be Continued next week with Part Two: Mike Schmidt and the Long Night


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